Location: Beijing city, China

Scope: Interiors

Type: New building

Total floor area: 604㎡

Max height: -

Design: 2018

Completion: 6/2019

Photography: Arch-Exist Photography

Awards

KUKAN Design Awards, Selected work, Tokyo, Japan, 2020

Jintang Prize, Honorable office design of the year, Shenzhen, China, 2020

Descriptions

This project locates in a commercial high-rise building; the client is an international trades company. The site consists of the office zone, public exhibition hall, twilight corridor, and nature courtyard, which have a layout from west to east. We concentrate on the mental feelings and the method of releasing stress in the workplace. As a result, we have anticipation to suppose a design trend for the future workplace.

How to deal with the negative pressures in office？

At the office, creations, exports, and appreciation is usually a positive reward, in actually, the negative influences and emotions encounter with us. We do design for dissolved these terrible feelings. In contemporary society, live in the heavy density of space, the high-speed mode, and abundant informational energy, facing all these complicated circumstances, we try to release or transform these anxieties. In light of the common routines, people prefer to choosing an extraordinary lifestyle inversely and tending to a comfortable status. Thus, when the ordinary and extraordinary scene exists correspondingly, there allowed releasing the negative pressures.

Whispers in a public exhibition hall

The public exhibition hall is the first sight once entering. There is a definite difference in the office zone and an extraordinary open exhibition hall. In this hall, including two scales of meeting rooms, pantry, dress room, and a live stream room, five functional volumes. The inspiration originated from the trades communication, which contains an exchange of products, the broadcasts of cultures. Therefore, the concept developed on a prototype of a concrete exhibition hall. No entrance face to the exhibition hall, where we situate a bench and exhibit several artworks. The texture of concrete creates the scenery of the museum. It just likes you are in a real museum, and people become the host in this place. Simplified structure, façade, and grey walls in lines generated a tranquil space; minimal interior reset the complex emotions and back to origins. It is spotless in the exhibition hall, where it forms a space for encountering, whispering, meditating, and feeling a sense of belongings.

Wanders in the nature courtyard

As an expansion of an extraordinary life, the mental freedoms could appear in the exhibition hall, whereas, the typology of behaviors, manners in communication, and social activities would occur in the nature courtyard. The leisure bar, multiple meeting rooms, financial office, tea house, and president office sequentially posited in the nature courtyard, which floor is full of gravel. Natural and scattered gravels make space available to roaming. The multi-function meeting room isolated from the gravels pool, which is entirely enveloped by the timber grilles and owns only one entrance route. When close or open the gratings door, the meeting room could switch to a multiple-stage. This place highlights social relations. The tea house is a comfortable semi-public space; gratings stand in two sides. The grilles balance translucency and privacy. The primary way throughout the courtyard zone from north to south, broaden the views; the VIP entrance look likes a branch accessed to the natural route.

Traverses and stays on the twilight corridor

The western area faces to the fabulous urban scenery; the narrow, long, and perspective grilles corridor is posited here, which is the only passage between the public exhibition hall and the nature courtyard. We especially expand this corridor to the edge of the site in a long distance. The gratings along with the glass façade of the building blur the city landscapes outside of the windows, balancing the cold and solid glass steel structure with the warm and harmony timber gratings, filtering the natural lightings into interiors. At twilight, the sunlight showers in the corridor and sculpts a line and line shadows on the floor; with the original natural elements and the flows of time, passing through the passage became a ritual process and particular experiences. The twilight corridor reflects spiritual meanings and philosophy thinking, throughout there, which brings a delicate and impressive sense. Catching lights and shadows, walking and staying, the corridor rewards to the recovers of spirits. Interestingly, the long corridor stimulates the curiosity of guests and pushes them forward to the end of the passage and creates imagination in an unpredictable space.

Project credits

Clients: Hyperion International Group

Architects: PLAT ASIA

Principle architect: DH Jung

Project architect: Guowei Liu

Design team: Jingyun Lian, Dongsheng Xiao, Xinwei Liu