Along the shifting shoreline of Chuanchang Island, Shenzhen-based studio Studio 10 has cast a cluster of concrete pillars that do more than hold up a roof — they double as birdhouses, water points, and skylights for a wetland that floods every year and then remakes itself. The pavilion sits within the Longyou wetlands of Quzhou City, Zhejiang, on a compact 85 sqm (915 sq ft) footprint shaped by the Qu River’s centuries of erosion and sedimentation. What emerges is less a single building than a small system of shelters, negotiating between visitors, resident wildlife, and the villagers who have long used this land as a buffer between river and settlement.
Ancient shoreline conditions set the terms here: Chuanchang Island’s dense forest and shoreline meadows have historically supported camping and informal gathering, while nearby ancient cave sites — carved by hand and weathered further by time — carry a quiet historical charge that the design team treated as a starting reference. The Wetland Cavespavilion takes its name directly from that lineage.
Annual flooding governs the site’s rhythm more than any masterplan could. Each rainy season submerges the buffer zone between river and island on Chuanchang Island; as water recedes, it leaves sediment behind that reshapes the terrain until new vegetation takes hold, forming fresh wetland meadows in a cycle that repeats indefinitely.
Bridging conservation and use was the project’s stated aim, addressing needs on both sides of the Longyou wetlands: the ecological balance of the site itself, and the practical requirements of visitors, campers, and the island’s residents who share the same ground.
Concrete pillars, scattered rather than gridded, form the pavilion’s vertical structure, drawing on the ancient cave columns and natural wetland waterholes found nearby. The approach anchors the structure into a landscape that is never quite stable, using minimal ground intervention so the pillars read as an extension of the terrain rather than an imposition on it.
Hollowed interiors turn several of the pillars into working infrastructure — trash collection, water supply, birdhouses, and lookout points are folded into the concrete mass itself. These voids expand unevenly within the walls, occasionally breaking through to form skylights, side windows, and openings that pull in ventilation, daylight, and framed views of the wetland beyond.
A bamboo roof, prefabricated in light steel and organized as a modular grid, spans across the pillars, its pattern drawn directly from local handmade bamboo craft traditions; the bamboo itself is sourced from forests nearby. Planters concealed at the top of each pillar let low-maintenance native climbing plants take hold along the grid, gradually folding the structure’s silhouette into the surrounding growth.
Surface and texture connect the pavilion back to its neighbors: the nearby ancient caves carry marks left by both manual excavation and natural weathering, and the pavilion’s custom concrete mix and coloring were developed in direct response to those textures. A comparable instinct — designing for a landscape defined by water’s advance and retreat — runs through Thomas Phifer’s flood-resiliency work at Wagner Park in New York, though the two projects arrive at very different material answers. Elsewhere in China, Studio Re-N’s floating pavilion in Songyang takes up a related question of architecture built to move with, rather than resist, a changeable waterline.
A living canopy will have pushed another season of growth along the bamboo grid by the time the rains recede each year — a detail no photograph taken today can fully anticipate, since the pavilion’s silhouette is designed to keep changing with every flood cycle it survives.
Wetland Caves by Studio 10 | Location: Chuanchang Island, Xiaonanhu Town, Longyou County, Quzhou City, Zhejiang, China — Year: 2023 — Key materials: concrete, prefabricated light-steel bamboo