A circular promenade that turns a stop into a landscape experience

Perched on a stone platform at the foot of Mount Luofu, this project occupies an unlikely leftover. Squeezed between a highway and a parallel river, the site once worked as a buffer zone and an informal parking pocket at a tight bend. Today, it has been reimagined as a cycling rest stop and lookout, pairing practical services with a carefully staged relationship to water, sky, and hills.

The pavilion reads as a concrete donut hovering just above the ground plane, an object with a faintly otherworldly presence, as if it has landed rather than been built. Its circular promenade turns the sharpness of the road into a slow experience, offering a pause without fully withdrawing from movement. From the riverbank edge to the rising mountain backdrop, the architecture is calibrated to make looking feel effortless.

The project’s scenic frames unfold across two levels. Below, a sunken plaza becomes a sheltered place to sit, drink, and regroup, protected by the mass of the ring overhead. Above, the roof level is a continuous loop for walking, an unbroken circuit that encourages lingering and return. The result is both a rest point and a viewpoint, where the act of stopping becomes part of the route.

With an outer diameter of 16 metres, the viewing platform is sliced by vertical cuts in multiple directions, forming oval openings that edit the surrounding landscape into distinct scenes. These cutouts overlap visually, so that views layer into one another as you move along the ring. At different moments, the architecture points your gaze upward to sky, outward to water, and across to the lush green slopes beyond.

Three supporting concrete volumes stand within the sunken plaza, containing a compact cafe, a public toilet, and storage. Their doors and windows align to create sightlines through and across the service core, keeping the lower level connected to the wider setting. A dark, hammered finish on these volumes echoes the stone paving underfoot, and sits alongside the sculptural seating titled Social Stone by Shanghai based artist SU Chang.

Material contrast sharpens the experience. The exterior surface was cast on site using moulds made from raised texture bamboo, with an approximate section diameter of 7 centimetres, giving the concrete a tactile skin that resonates with the site’s wild edge. Inside, the concrete turns smooth and seamless, producing a quieter, more abstract atmosphere. The transition is most vivid along the oval cuts, where the ruffled edge brings the bamboo imprint into crisp relief.

What began as an architectural gesture toward mountain quiet has quickly become a destination in itself. The hovering ring now draws cyclists and visitors in numbers, animated by voices, footsteps, and the nearby rush of traffic. Rather than resisting that reality, the pavilion absorbs it, transforming a marginal roadside pocket into a shared moment of rest, circulation, and view.

Project Credit

Project name: Resting Loop with Views
Architect: HCCH Studio
Location: Mount. Luofu of Huizhou City, Guangdong Province, China
Time: Jan – Sept 2025
Photography: Fangfang Tian, ArchExist, Guowei Liu, Qingyan Zhu

More Photos