Resting Loop with Views by HCCH Studio lands a sixteen-meter concrete donut on a mountainside platform in Huizhou, China — a cycling pavilion that transcends infrastructure to become a meditation on landscape and pause.
It looks, from the air, like a concrete donut that landed on a mountainside and decided to stay. Sixteen metres in diameter, porous and hovering above a stone platform between highway and river, HCCH Studio’s Resting Loop with Views occupies a site that was previously a parking area at a sharp bend in the road on Mount Luofu. The functional brief — rest stop and vista point for cyclists, with services for parking and beverages — could have produced a shed. Instead it produced something closer to a small observatory for landscape itself.
Vertical planes cut through the ring in several directions, creating oval openings that frame different views: river, mountain, sky. These cutouts overlap within each other, so the experience of walking the upper promenade is one of continuous recomposition. The lower level, a sunken plaza, provides seating and the tiny café. Three supporting concrete volumes house the practical programme — café, toilet, storage — their dark hammered surfaces echoing the plaza’s stone paving and artist SU Chang’s sculptural ‘social stone’ seats. Above, the ring offers what the architects call an endless-loop promenade: a walk that has no beginning and no end, only a sequence of framed landscapes.
The surfaces carry the project’s most considered decision. The exterior was cast in-situ using moulds of bamboo roughly seven centimetres in cross-section, pressing the texture of the surrounding vegetation directly into the concrete. Inside, the surface is smooth, seamless, almost abstract. Where the two meet — at the ruffle-shaped edges of each oval cut — the contrast is startling. Rough bark gives way to polished interior in a single step, like entering a different atmosphere without crossing a door.
The architects envisioned tranquil seclusion. What they got was a destination. The flying donut became immediately popular, a must-visit stop on the cycling route, filled with voices and the sound of wheels on asphalt. The divergence might be the project’s most honest outcome. It works not because it delivers solitude but because it makes a place worth gathering in — a piece of infrastructure that became, almost by accident, a piece of public life.
