Jinji Lake Pavilion — a canopy of pixelated leaves on the Suzhou waterfront

Completed in 2025, the Jinji Lake Pavilion is BIG’s first finished building in Suzhou — a 1,200 m² public space along the Jinji Lake waterfront and one of eleven permanent pavilions developed as part of the city’s initiative to animate a 13-kilometer lakeside promenade.

The design merges the traditional Chinese courtyard typology with the offerings of a contemporary public space. Four interconnected volumes — housing a café, boutique, restaurant, and visitor center — are arranged around a central courtyard where a single tree serves as a quiet focal point at the heart of the composition.

The defining move is the roof. Replacing the glazed ceramic tiles of the traditional Chinese teahouse with actual glass tiles, BIG creates a pixelated canopy of leaf-like forms that drapes toward the ground, filters daylight through two layers of perforated panels, and casts dappled shadows that mimic the surrounding camphor trees. Polished steel surfaces reflect light and greenery, dissolving the boundary between pavilion and landscape.

Conceived as a smaller counterpart to BIG’s adjacent Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art — expected to complete later this year — the pavilion is rooted in the rich heritage of Suzhou’s Chinese garden architecture while projecting a distinctly contemporary spatial language.

Suzhou, China