Bronze Landscape Planning and Garden Design · 2026
Timscape Indoor Landscape
by Xinpeng Liu
- A' Design Award 2026 Bronze Winner in Landscape Planning and Garden Design
- Awarded April 15, 2026
- CLIENT: Tim Hortons
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 6,161
- Verification code BB72AC7F53 · Verify this award
About Timscape Indoor Landscape
This project creates a near zero energy smart vertical garden for Tims Cafe in the underground first floor of Beijing's Jewelry Mall. Reinterpreting classical Chinese garden philosophy with a green core and walkable rainforest landscapes, it integrates intelligent irrigation, full spectrum LED grow lights and rooftop photovoltaics for energy self sufficiency and closed loop water recycling. The 236 square meter space combines ecological materials, therapeutic planting and digital operations, building a sustainable commercial interior landscape model reconnecting urban dwellers with nature.
Xinpeng Liu's Timscape Indoor Landscape represents a significant contribution to the evolving field of commercial biophilic design, where interior environments increasingly incorporate living botanical elements to enhance human psychological wellbeing, air quality, and spatial experience, situating this work within the broader contemporary movement toward nature-integrated architecture and the growing recognition of biophilia as essential to healthful urban environments. The installation demonstrates considerable compositional sophistication through its skillful orchestration of multiple design vocabularies, the crisp geometric minimalism of the architectural planter container establishing rational order and spatial definition while the exuberant organic naturalism of the tropical and temperate plantings introduces visual complexity, textural richness, and the irreducible vitality of living growth, this dialectic between controlled built form and expressive botanical abundance creating productive tension that animates the entire composition. The technical execution reveals notable accomplishment across multiple domains, particularly in the horticultural curation where diverse plant specimens including delicate ferns, bold broadleaf tropicals, colorful accent foliage, and structural driftwood elements combine to suggest compressed forest floor ecology within the constrained volume, the layered planting strategy creating remarkable spatial depth and visual density while maintaining individual plant legibility and appropriate growing conditions for species with varying light and moisture requirements. The lighting design merits particular attention, as the carefully positioned track-mounted spotlights deliver controlled illumination that serves simultaneously functional and aesthetic purposes, ensuring adequate photosynthetic energy for plant health while creating dramatic visual effects through raking light that articulates leaf textures, casts interleaved shadows, and generates atmospheric chiaroscuro depth, the integration of misting systems further enhancing both horticultural function and experiential quality by maintaining humidity levels while producing luminous atmospheric effects as water vapor catches and diffuses the spotlight beams into diaphanous veils. The work appears to explore fundamental questions regarding human relationship with nature in increasingly urbanized contexts, offering a microenvironment where commercial activity and botanical sanctuary coexist, where the psychological and physiological benefits of vegetation, living color, organic form, and humid atmosphere become accessible within spaces traditionally dominated by hard architectural surfaces and artificial systems. Thematically, the installation invites contemplation of boundaries between interior and exterior, cultivated and wild, architecture and landscape, object and environment, functioning simultaneously as horticultural display, environmental sculpture, functional air quality intervention, and experiential refuge. The composition may reference historical traditions of conservatory design, Japanese miniaturized landscape aesthetics, Victorian ferneries and Wardian cases, and the legacy of atrium gardens in commercial architecture, translating these precedents into contemporary design language appropriate to current retail and commercial contexts. Formally, the work achieves successful integration of living dynamic elements that grow, change, and respond to environmental conditions into a carefully composed aesthetic statement, acknowledging the temporal dimension inherent in horticultural installation where the artwork continuously evolves through natural processes. One might observe how the misting system's atmospheric effects transform the entire volume into a liminal space suggesting forest clearings after rain or mountainside cloud forest conditions, inviting viewers to pause, breathe more deeply, and experience momentary respite from surrounding commercial activity, demonstrating how thoughtfully designed biophilic interventions can meaningfully enhance human experience of built environments while celebrating the enduring aesthetic and psychological power of living botanical abundance.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- This near-zero-energy smart vertical garden for Tims Cafe in Beijing's underground commercial area merges classical Chinese garden philosophy with modern low-carbon technology. Its four strengths include creating a walkable, viewable green core that integrates coffee service and social spaces, breaking rigid underground commercial design. An intelligent irrigation system and full-spectrum LED lights simulate a rainforest microclimate for tropical plants. Photovoltaic power and closed-loop water circulation enable near-zero-energy operation using recyclable materials. By blending commercial functions with ecological landscape, it transforms a light-deprived basement into an immersive urban oasis, reconnecting humans with nature and setting a new standard for sustainable commercial design.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- Design area 236 square meters
- Tags
- Sustainable design, Classical Chinese garden, Vertical Greening, Rainforest Landscape, Composite Commercial Space, Smart Garden
- Production Technology
- The design was crafted via a synergistic methodology blending classical Chinese garden design principles with modern sustainable landscape and digital technologies. Core techniques included extracting traditional garden spatial logic, layered layout, dynamic circulation, and nature human integration, to restructure the enclosed underground space into a landscape centered green core with composite functions. Ecologically, carbon sequestering, minimally processed natural wood was adopted for structural frameworks, enabling circular resource utilization. Technologically, a customized intelligent system was integrated, full spectrum LED grow lights simulating natural daylight, automated precision irrigation drip and sprinkler, photovoltaic power supply for landscape operations, and closed loop water circulation. Plant selection followed the right plant for right place principle, with scientific multi species collocation for a stable indoor plant community. The design also applied horticultural therapy principles, leveraging plant psychological benefits to enhance human experience, unifying cultural expression, ecological sustainability and technological innovation throughout the design and implementation process.
- Design Challenge
- The greatest challenge was creating a viable, sustainable vertical garden in a fully enclosed underground space with no natural daylight, poor ventilation and limited vertical height-overcoming these inherent physical constraints while balancing cultural expression, commercial functionality and ecological sustainability. Externally, technical hurdles included simulating a stable growing environment for tropical/subtropical plants in Beijing's climate, developing a self-sufficient near-zero energy system for landscape operations, and achieving closed-loop water circulation to meet green building standards. Internally, the creative challenge lay in reinterpreting classical Chinese garden philosophy for a modern commercial underground context: translating its spatial aesthetics and functional logic into a compact, composite space without losing cultural essence, and integrating traditional design motifs with minimalist modern architecture. Additionally, aligning the landscape's long-term O&M efficiency with low-carbon goals required iterative testing of intelligent irrigation/lighting systems and ecological material applications, ensuring technological feasibility matched design vision while satisfying commercial space usage demands.
- Project Duration
- Design commenced in December 2022, and the project was completed in Beijing in August 2024.
- Operation Flow
- This indoor garden space works in a simple and intuitive way for daily use. Visitors can walk through and experience the green environment freely, just like being in a natural garden. The whole system runs automatically without complex operation.
The intelligent lighting and watering devices adjust themselves based on the actual needs of plants, providing stable light and water at proper times. Clean energy is used to power the whole landscape system, and water is recycled to reduce waste.
Different plants are arranged to create a comfortable and refreshing atmosphere. This design not only makes the underground space feel open and lively instead of dark and closed, but also keeps plants healthy for a long time. It brings real nature experience to people indoors, improves comfort effectively, and creates a more pleasant commercial space with low energy use and easy daily management. - Research
- This research is a practical design and environmental study focused on indoor landscape and underground commercial spaces. Its goal is to solve the lack of nature in dense cities, improve underground space experience, and create a healthy, low maintenance and sustainable green area. We used on site investigation, user behavior observation and plant growth testing. Tools included environment measuring devices and long term monitoring of light, ventilation and plant conditions. Participants included commercial space visitors, daily users and later stage management staff. Results showed the space greatly improved comfort, plant survival remained stable, energy and water use stayed low, and management was simple. The research showed that integrating traditional garden ideas with smart systems can effectively improve underground environments. It provides a usable model for commercial space design, promotes urban ecological development, and offers a replicable method for healthy, low carbon indoor landscape design.
- Inspiration
- This project reconnects humans with nature within a 236-square-meter underground commercial space in Beijing, addressing the loss of urban green areas caused by high-density development. Located in the basement of Beijing International Jewelry Trading Center, the site lacks natural daylight, ventilation, and vertical height.
Inspired by classical Chinese garden design principles, particularly the Lion Grove Garden, the concept creates a walkable, viewable, and inhabitable green core that integrates coffee service, social interaction, and nature education. Traditional elements are refined into minimalist modern architecture, breaking conventional commercial layouts to reduce enclosure.
Smart operation systems and near-zero energy technologies sustain the vertical garden without natural light. Intelligent maintenance, ecological materials, and closed-loop energy and water systems support low-carbon design.
The result transforms the constrained underground space into an urban oasis combining commercial function, natural ecology, cultural heritage, and sustainability, expressing classical Chinese garden aesthetics through contemporary, technology-empowered design.
Colors of Timscape Indoor Landscape
Grand Interview about Timscape Indoor Landscape
I am most proud of proving that a tropical plant community can thrive long-term in a basement with absolutely no sunlight or fresh air. After more than a decade of indoor landscape practice, I have always believed that the boundary between "indoor" and "outdoor" is imposed by building conventions, not by ecological necessity. Timscape pushes this idea to its most extreme test—a 236-square-meter underground commercial space in Beijing.The single element that best embodies our ambition is the intelligent LED canopy paired with the closed-loop misting system. This is not ordinary grow lights; it is a simulated rainforest sky that follows daily light rhythms, supporting both plant growth and human wellbeing. When visitors step off the escalator into the basement, the immediate shift—from the harsh commercial space above to a humid, living green world below—creates what I call a "cognitive reset." The body recognizes nature before the mind can label it as technology. That moment of disbelief is exactly the reconnection we set out to engineer.
Timscape is a proof-of-concept for the "underground biophilic layer"—a repeatable spatial type that can be inserted into any commercial space lacking natural light. Three core strategies make it adaptable worldwide:Modular ecosystem units. Each unit has its own soil, irrigation, and lighting. The system can scale up or down, and individual units can be swapped or reconfigured without disrupting the whole. A developer in Dubai or São Paulo simply changes the plant palette while keeping the same infrastructure.Vertical layering. In a low-ceiling basement, we create visual depth through stacked planting planes—canopy, mid-layer, ground cover, and climbing walls—making a small space feel much larger.Closed-loop resource cycling. Rooftop solar powers the LEDs; condensate and filtered water feed the irrigation. The basement becomes a metabolic node within the building's larger resource cycle, not a drain on it.
Lighting: We tuned the LED spectrum across blue light (for growth), red light (for flowering), and far-red light (to prevent leggy growth), mimicking the way rainforest light shifts from morning through midday to evening.Irrigation: Soil moisture sensors and leaf wetness monitors feed a central controller that pulses mist at 60-second intervals, with UV sterilization and root-zone biofiltration keeping water oxygen levels above 6 mg/L.Plant selection: We chose by function, not just appearance. Large-leaf, high-coverage species like Philodendron and Monstera go in seating areas for stress relief. Shade-tolerant ferns, Anthurium, and Begonia form a self-sustaining community rather than a static display. The goal is a living plant community that can regulate itself, not merely look good on opening day.
The Lion Grove Garden is not a collection of decorative motifs; it is a three-dimensional expression of Chan Buddhist philosophy, where maze-like rock formations represent the "mountain of the mind" and spatial disorientation is intentional—a tool for contemplation. Translating this into a basement coffee shop required what I call "strategic compression."Our approach was to abstract the spatial logic, not copy the visual symbols:Compression and release: The entry is narrow and low (like a garden corridor), then suddenly opens into the main volume (like a courtyard surprise).Materials that tell stories: Weathered limestone flooring echoes Taihu stone texture; brushed bronze counters with natural patina recall ancient garden vessels.Cultural subtlety: No Chinese lanterns or obvious motifs, yet the space feels unmistakably Eastern at a gut level.The most critical decision was turning basement constraints into garden qualities: no windows becomes the enclosed courtyard's inward focus; low ceilings become intimate garden scale; structural columns become pavilion posts in a forest. We did not imitate the garden; we created an equivalent bodily experience.
The biggest challenge was keeping the soil microbiome stable long-term. In the early months, oxygen-poor zones deep in the soil caused root rot, fungal outbreaks, and death of the beneficial fungal partnerships plants need for nutrient uptake. The plants were surviving on technical life support, not living on their own.The breakthrough came when we stopped treating soil as dead potting mix and started designing it as a living soil ecosystem. We introduced beneficial fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria, restructured soil porosity, and switched to pulsed irrigation that mimics natural wet-dry cycles.This permanently changed my understanding of "ecological authenticity." I used to think authenticity meant looking like nature; now I believe it means being able to self-regulate biologically. Technology should not replace nature; it should scaffold nature so it can stand on its own.
Core belief: urban dwellers suffer from "nature deficit disorder"—not an aesthetic problem, but a neurobiological one. Timscape is therapeutic intervention, not decoration.Three-act experience:Act I (Entry): Narrow, low, dense, humid—deliberately slightly disorienting, opening the sensesAct II (Main space): Sudden openness, LED canopy filtering through leaves like sunlight, body relaxes before mind catches upAct III (Seating): Semi-enclosed alcoves like forest shelters, looking out at the "landscape," coffee becomes a ritual anchorMaterial principle: All surfaces must be biologically compatible—no plastic smell, no glare, no artificial fragrance. The limestone contains visible fossils; the bronze oxidizes authentically; the soil breathes visibly at the base of walls.The most emotionally powerful moment is "the canopy gaze"—within 90 seconds of entry, visitors instinctively look up at the LED light filtering through leaves. Shoulders drop, breathing deepens, facial muscles soften. This is evolutionary memory, not a designed feature.
China's Indoor Landscape market is exploding, yet most remains biophilically barren. Timscape proves barrenness is a design choice, not a technical limit.Three phases:Now: Using 18 months of operational data (25 kWh/m²/year energy, 40% longer dwell time) to convince developers to shift from "green decoration" to "green infrastructure"Future: Developing three derivative models—shopping mall, office atriums, healthcare waiting environments.
The unexpected realization: project success depends less on any single technical strength than on the quality of "translation" between disciplines. The horticulturist's "healthy" and the lighting designer's "beautiful" are not the same language; the brand's "conversion rate" and the garden's "growth cycle" need reconciliation.The best designs emerge at disciplinary fault lines—the LED spectrum that satisfies both plant efficiency and human comfort; the circulation path that channels traffic while preserving contemplative corners.To emerging designers: Do not aspire to master everything; aspire to translate between fields. Nature, technology, culture, and commerce are independent systems with their own logic. The designer's job is not to assemble them side by side, but to find conditions where they mutually benefit one another. Timscape is not my personal design; it is the emergent result of a disciplinary ecosystem I was privileged to cultivate.
We worked with a horticultural therapy consultant to map plant characteristics to psychological goals:Large-leaf species (Monstera, Philodendron) in seating areas → activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing stressComplex but not overwhelming planting → "soft fascination," restoring attention without demanding focusSemi-enclosed seating → reduces visual exposure while maintaining acoustic connection, easing social pressureMonitoring results:Dwell time +40%Return visits +25%Visitors actively choose less convenient seats with direct plant contactTouching leaves and photographing plants exceeds brand signage photographyConclusion: The space is used as a garden that happens to serve coffee, not a coffee shop that happens to have plants.
Core principle: Technology should be invisible—not absent, but absorbed into the background of experience.Three rules:Temporal naturalization: LEDs follow real sunrise-sunset patterns with random "cloud" variations; irrigation mimics natural rainfall irregularity; air movement makes leaves sway like windSensory redundancy: Sight, touch, sound, and smell all work together. If one system fails, the others maintain the immersive effectControlled imperfection: Nature is not perfectly constant. We allow slight humidity swings, natural leaf drop, seasonal growth changes—these "flaws" signal that the system is aliveVisitors do not experience a technologically convincing simulation. They experience genuine life supported by technology. The emotional depth comes not from LED sophistication or irrigation precision, but from the biological reality of plants growing, flowering, and rooting. Technology is merely the condition that makes this life possible in an impossible place.