Poly Yuzhu High-Rise Apartment and Commercial Street

The project began with a masterplan refinement problem. The original tower placement blocked river-view corridors from the surrounding city, created circulation pressure on site, and produced a flat skyline that worked against the waterfront character of the location. Resolving these issues required shifting the tower position, which in turn restructured the whole site's relationship to the river and to neighbouring blocks.

The revised masterplan established an east-high, west-low skyline that supports clearer views across the site, eases movement through it, and creates a more human-scaled waterfront edge. These decisions were not only about form. They were about how different people, residents, pedestrians, visitors arriving by boat, people looking across from the opposite bank, would experience the site from different positions and at different times.

For HENEX, this case connects to R13 because the design process was structured around making those multiple viewpoints visible and testable, rather than resolving the project from a single dominant perspective.

The design concept, Cloud Terrace — Blooming Oasis, describes a fluid spatial system where terraces, folded retail streets and vertical greenery are woven together rather than separated by type. The concept focuses on how people perceive, move and connect with the river, treating the building's public edges as a layered sequence of spaces rather than a boundary between inside and outside.

Terraces step down from the residential floors to the commercial street level, carrying planting and public space across multiple levels. The folded retail street geometry creates a more varied and experientially rich shopping environment than a conventional podium, giving the commercial programme a distinctly bayfront identity. Vertical greenery integrates with the tower facade, connecting the building's residential scale back to the landscape character of the waterfront.

Together these elements create an environment that merges urban energy with nature, where the architecture and landscape are not separate design layers but a single coherent experience of the site.

The masterplan refinement work at the beginning of this project established something that has shaped every subsequent decision: the idea that a waterfront site is experienced from many positions simultaneously, not just from the street in front of the building. The tower height, the skyline profile, the view corridors and the waterfront edge all read differently depending on where you are standing. Making those multiple viewpoints part of the design logic, rather than optimising for one dominant reading, was the central discipline of the early project phase.

The implementation phase is teaching a different lesson: that spatial continuity across a mixed-use project is fragile. The ambition to make the terraces, the retail street, the residential floors and the waterfront edge feel like one continuous environment depends on keeping that goal visible and shared across many consultants and construction teams over several years. The work is ongoing, and the outcomes are not yet final, but the project has already clarified how much leadership in complex delivery is about protecting design intent over time, not just establishing it at the start.