Sanya Guanlan Garden is nestled within a bustling urban environment, yet it enjoys a unique tranquility. The landscape design achieves a transition from open public spaces facing the city to inward-facing cloistered courtyards through a well-ordered spatial sequence of varying elevations and open-closed spaces. This allows visitors to wander under large trees, among terraced fields, along winding waterways, beside dense woods, and through sand gardens, experiencing a rich and continuous landscape journey. Inspired by the Yahou Terraces of Hainan, the design takes into account the site's elevation differences, preserving the original tropical vegetation and animal communities. It not only integrates rural scenery into the urban fabric but also introduces a complex ecosystem of "jungle-terrace-village-river" that blends natural and artificial elements into Guanlan Garden. This transforms the previously inaccessible jungle into an appreciable and usable urban green space, providing a scenic retreat and activity area for city dwellers, as well as a wild habitat for flora and fauna. The landscape design merges land art with ecological principles. On one hand, while maintaining the rich and rugged natural wildness characteristic of the tropical region, it creates a landscape with clean, fluid lines and a rhythmic sense through detailed design, presenting a nature that is sculpted by human hands. On the other hand, it restores the area's ecology to serve functions such as noise and dust reduction, water purification, and increasing biodiversity.
The Guanlan Garden project, serving as a pioneering demonstration zone for urban renewal in the Hailuo district of Sanya, exemplifies this concept on a smaller scale. By introducing the regional agricultural textures and pastoral imagery of Hainan into the heart of the city, it creates a model that blends open public spaces with a resort-style residential community. This approach explores the expression of regional characteristics in the design of tropical urban living environments, reflecting people's desire to return to a simpler, more peaceful rural ideal within the context of urban life.
Through a modern naturalistic design approach, the hydrological processes of mountainous terraced fields in agricultural productive landscapes are artistically translated into urban spaces. This process represents a fusion of aesthetics and natural ecological processes.