playful rolling ball installation by drawing architecture studio transforms chengdu plaza

Drawing Architecture Studio stages rolling ball installation

Drawing Architecture Studio has completed a large-scale, site-specific rolling ball installation in Chengdu, China, commissioned by Taikoo Li Chengdu, an open-air, low-rise commercial and cultural district in the city center. Installed for the holiday season in a central plaza facing a thousand-year-old temple, the installation titled Fun Palace transforms the site into an immersive landscape of movement, combining five looping ball-track systems with five sculptural architectural forms. Drawing on Aldo Rossi’s ideas of architecture as a repository of collective memory and echoing the spirit of Luna Luna, the 1987 Hamburg art amusement park that turned works by artists such as Keith Haring and Salvador Dalí into playful public experiences, the public installation frames architecture as a tool for joy, participation, and everyday wonder.

2025 winter public art installation at Taikoo Li Chengdu | all images © Arch-Exist Photography unless stated otherwise

‘fun Palace’ Weaves Kinetic Landscape into Chengdu plaza

The Fun Palace installation occupies a plaza framed by ginkgo trees and a shallow reflecting pool, a space that becomes the setting for a temporary artwork each holiday season. Drawing Architecture Studio fills the site with overlapping tracks that weave around five miniature buildings, creating a layered environment that visitors can walk through, observe, and inhabit. Each building functions both as an independent sculpture and as a key node within the kinetic system, redirecting the rolling balls and altering their speed as they pass through.

At ground level, the curved outline of the installation echoes the fluid geometry of the tracks above, while parts of the system extend into the surrounding tree clusters, visually integrating architecture and landscape. Colorful metal balls and custom benches are scattered throughout the plaza, encouraging visitors to pause and watch the choreography of movement unfold.

the Stage, echoing the forms of Sichuan opera headpieces

Everyday Rituals Transformed into Playful Architectural Forms

The five sculptural forms reinterpret familiar local activities, eating hotpot, visiting teahouses, playing mahjong, watching Sichuan opera, and skiing in nearby mountains, into fictional ‘architectural sculptures.’ These memories shape both the appearance of the structures and the specific routes of the rolling balls, turning cultural references into spatial and kinetic experiences.

Constructed from ordinary corrugated PVC panels, the installation maintains an everyday material language while achieving a precise and carefully crafted finish. Fun Palace ultimately proposes a lighter, more playful role for architecture in public space, one that invites curiosity and shared experience within the contemporary urban fabric.

the Mahjong Building, referencing both mahjong tables and the zigzag staircases of the locally well-known Yuanyang Building