Compared with the gray stain that China’s megalopoli have become, dehumanized and tediously uniform, the new entrance to a sales center in Huzhou is a garden of radical imagination, and thus a veritable manifesto against the generic city. A forest of steel columns of different sizes forms an artificial landscape in the manner of Magritte, with its very own orography of caves, hills, streams, rocks, and cascades, and even its own ever changing climate conditions, complete with clouds, starry skies, fog, and mist.

The dream-like atmosphere creates a place that residents of the neighborhood and city at large can well identify with, condensing feelings and meanings way transcending the objectivity of the built form. Merry-go-rounds, swings, and fountains are fragments of a highly eclectic project in which the visitor, like Alice, is transported to a wonderland that is magical but necessary.