Flower Room is a five-square-meter open scaffold at the forest edge in Huizhou, China. Conceived by Office for Roundtable with JXY Studio, the project elevates native flora above invasive undergrowth and organizes tiered habitats that admit sun, wind, and rain. The structure functions as a compact field station for observing plant-insect relationships while minimizing ground disturbance.
Flower Room Technical Information
- Architects: Office for Roundtable & JXY Studio
- Location: Huizhou, China
- Gross Area: 5 m2 | 54 Sq. Ft.
- Project Year: 2024
- Photographs: © Leyuan Li, © Jiaxun Xu
We conceived an open and porous scaffold that lets wind, sun, and rain coauthor microclimates, so a footprint of five square meters can host meaningful exchanges between plants, insects, and people.
– Leyuan Li
Forest Edge as Ecological Brief
Situated at the hinge between countryside and forest, Flower Room responds to a local decline in biodiversity, driven by aggressive climbers that blanket the understory and suppress light at ground level. The commission is framed less as a pavilion and more as a habitat scaffold that interrupts this blanket, raising native species into the light and reorganizing the first few vertical meters of the forest edge.
The project recasts the greenhouse typology as an open instrument. Instead of sealing the climate, it welcomes wind, rainfall, and drifting seed. The porous frame invites bees, butterflies, and birds to transit, perch, and forage, turning the enclosure into a place of welcome. This approach acknowledges that at an ecotone, flux is not a disturbance to be excluded but a driver of ecological function.
Within approximately five square meters, the installation operates as a modest field station. Its spatial hierarchy supports observation of pollination, seed dispersal, and seasonal phenology at close range. The scale is deliberately small, favoring careful stewardship and repeatable learning over spectacle, and allowing local conditions to be read rather than overwritten.
Spatial Strategy and Microclimate Design
Vertical planting racks and tiered flower boxes are oriented with slight shifts in height, aspect, and spacing to construct gradients of light and moisture. These offsets produce a spectrum from shaded, humid niches to sunny, quick-drying ledges, enabling species with different tolerances to coexist in tight proximity. The section thus becomes the primary plan, with elevation and tilt doing the work that a larger footprint would otherwise require.
Environmental control relies on porosity rather than equipment. Without glazing or mechanical systems, prevailing winds move through the lattice, and rainfall is admitted, caught, or shed depending on each planter’s position. The arrangement accepts variability as a resource: intermittent wetting, shifting shadows, and diurnal breezes create microclimates that change across hours and seasons, encouraging diverse growth tempos.
Accessibility to care is balanced with ecological priorities. Pathways for hand access and pruning are embedded within the grid, but the structure privileges continuous flight paths and landing points for pollinators over human circulation. This maintains legibility for observation while minimizing disturbance to the very processes under study.
Structure, Modularity, and Ground Tactics
A lightweight steel frame assembled from interlocking members forms a legible kit of parts. The logic of repetition ensures stability with minimal material and supports quick assembly, reconfiguration, or repair. Modularity is not formal rhetoric here; it allows planting arrays to be adjusted as species establish, decline, or migrate across the scaffold.
Point supports touch the site lightly, concentrating loads at a few feet to avoid scraping and compaction. This “kiss” minimizes disturbance to existing soil biota and root systems and respects the site as a living substrate rather than a neutral platform. The ground strategy complements the ecological brief by reducing the installation’s footprint in both physical and biological terms.
The open lattice works as a spatial sieve. It accommodates variable planting densities and growth stages while maintaining clear voids for movement. Perch-friendly members and void corridors create a three-dimensional field that birds and insects can navigate, aligning structural patterns with behavioral patterns rather than imposing a single organizational order.
Temporality, Replicability, and Ecological Metrics
Conceived as temporary, the project emphasizes ongoing care and adjustment over a fixed form. This temporal stance aligns with ecological timescales: plant communities shift, invasive pressure fluctuates, and weather regimes vary. The architecture is calibrated to be tuned rather than preserved, and its value is measured in the quality of interactions it enables, not in permanence.
The kit-of-parts framework supports replication at similar forest edges or peri-urban margins. Transplantable logic replaces site-specific signature: modular racks, point supports, and porous envelopes can be scaled or reoriented to fit new contexts while keeping the core tactic of elevating native species and enabling multi-species passage.
Crucially, the installation invites measurable assessment. Species richness within and around the scaffold, pollinator counts across flowering cycles, seed set and viability, and the incidence of invasive recolonization can all be monitored against seasonally adjusted baselines. Such metrics test whether the spatial and structural strategies meaningfully counter shade-driven suppression and inform subsequent iterations, closing the loop between design intention and ecological performance.
About Office for Roundtable
Based in China and established in recent years, Office for Roundtable is a design practice committed to spatial experimentation, ecological engagement, and collaborative making. The studio works across architecture, landscape, and installation, developing site-sensitive frameworks that shape human and more-than-human interactions. With an emphasis on modularity, adaptability, and environmental porosity, their projects often function as living laboratories, emphasizing care, observation, and coexistence within contemporary ecological contexts.
About JXY Studio
JXY Studio is an interdisciplinary architecture and design practice based in Guangzhou, China, founded by Yue Xu and Jiaxun Xu, that explores the intersections of architecture, art, and culture by challenging fixed boundaries, employing modular systems and material innovation to create adaptive, socially engaged spaces that are both experimental and contextually aware.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Lead Architects: Leyuan Li, Xuanyu Wei, Yue Xu, Jiaxun Xu
- Landscape designers: Liwei Shen, Haocheng Ruan
- Client: Donghua Chen Studio
