archi-union combines digital fabrication and bamboo craft with ‘linpan cloud eye’

‘linpan cloud eye’ frames the landscape of rural china

Shanghai-based studio Archi-Union designs this landmark Linpan Cloud Eye as a community center in Qingxia Town, a rural village of China‘s Sichuan Province. The three-level building can be found about an hour’s drive from Chengdu. Surrounded by bamboo forest and mountain streams, the project serves as a cultural and community health hub while embracing the site’s natural topography.

The center is tucked into a hillside clearing where a stream enters from the east. Archi-Union retained the dense bamboo grove and arranged the program around a small courtyard that steps upward with the slope. Activity spaces occupy the lower two floors, and a third-floor terrace opens to mountain views. This vertical layering creates a parallel relationship with a nearby cliffside and frames distant fields through roof apertures, inspiring its name, ‘Cloud Eye.’

linpan cloud archi-union
images © Ke Wang

archi-union’s digitally-designed rooftop

Visitors enter along a bamboo-lined path, which the team at Archi-Union designs to conceal the Linpan Cloud Eye until the last turn. A flowing roof canopy guides them into a series of outdoor platforms that link interior and exterior spaces. Three primary courtyards — a bamboo entry, a central green, and a roof terrace — are open for community gatherings and everyday use. Wide openings and covered walkways reflect traditional Sichuan typologies while maintaining clear circulation.

The building can be recognized by its dramatic rooftop, whose sculptural construction is supported by three curved steel beams. The precise geometries of these beams were generated through digital modeling, then rationalized into straight segments for efficient fabrication. A skin of locally-crafted bamboo finishes the ceilings and handrails, bringing an element of regional craft to the contemporary architecture. These natural textures soften the concrete and steel structure and reinforce the center’s dialogue with its environment.

linpan cloud archi-union
Linpan Cloud Eye sits within a bamboo forest in China’s Sichuan Province

robotic craft for a rural site

A key interior feature of the Linpan Cloud Eye is its ‘water wall,’ a 3D-printed element created by Archi-Union to capture the movement of nearby creek water in sculpted folds. The architects used algorithmic design to translate the water’s shifting surface into machine-readable code, allowing robots to fabricate the panels with precision. The result brings a digital logic to a project otherwise defined by its handcrafted bamboo work and rural design language.

Elevated ground-floor areas hover over the bamboo grove, while upper levels offer quieter spaces and panoramic platforms. By combining advanced construction methods with vernacular forms and local craft, the project establishes a contemporary precedent for rural development that honors its landscape and lends a space for the community.

linpan cloud archi-union
the building follows the natural slope with three vertically-stacked levels