Taiyuan Botanical Garden − Restaurant & Tea House

The botanical garden complex includes a trio of domed glass greenhouses housing tropical, dessert and aquatic plants, a bonsai museum, a research centre, a visitor centre, and a restaurant & tea house. The design integrates an artificial landscape of mountains, hills, vegetation, water, and buildings.

The overall structural concept for the complex draws from traditional Chinese wood roof structures and reinterprets the structural and geometric logic to combine the loading aspects with desired aesthetic expressions. Three main principles were considered: stacked and interlaced beam layers, stages, and scaling layers—adding or removing layers towards supports or edges and proportion between space and structure.

The restaurant, visitor centre and building connecting all three domes comprise an array of glued-laminated timber beams supported by reinforced concrete columns. The number of layers depends on the load and span of the roof, between two to eight layers.

The restaurant & tea house, entrance/visitor centre and the building connecting all three domes utilise a façade system of large doubled-glazed panels and glass fins to allow maximum transparency.