Brand Center of Ugan Concept / Jiangjiu Architecture

Interiors Designers: Jiangjiu Architecture
Location: North Chongyi Rd., Anno Domini, Hangzhou, China
Architect In Charge: A John
Design Team: Yin Xu ,Jinliang Li
Client: Ugan Concept
Area: 600.0 m2
Project Year: 2018
Photographs: Feng Shao

Text description provided by the architects. As a wooden floor brand, Ugan Concept has met a designing aporia with huge amounts of wood available: how to construct “a space of wood quality” instead of “a wooden” space, making “the quality of wood” a state and an atmosphere rather than “a material” and “functions of the material”? It’s like being in the forest, we would not concern about trees in a materialized way; instead, we will have self-perception aroused by the integrity generalized by the surroundings in which trees grow: the sense of smells, the touch of winds, the spots of lights, the distance of sounds and so on. The perception won’t come from anywhere else. We may call it “the experience of forest-quality”.

According to our thinking habits about space, forest, without its biological characters and natural features, has no evident division in area and function. When we are in the forest, we would not identify the area we are in according to layers of different vegetation, nor walk towards a particular target along certain paths. This may be the so-called “the sense of boundarylessness.”

At the entrance, in order to indicate its fluxility, an abstract pavilion is used rather than a gate and a courtyard; thus, the affection will be aroused naturally from outside to inside. On contrast, we partly remove the window, which was an important part functioning as a half partition in the building, and design a new container – a tearoom, which blurred the relationships between the interior (office) space and the exterior (courtyard) space with its spirits of “from inside to outside.”

To make it a loop in the whole space, we removed the partition walls of the bathroom in the core area of traffic and design an invisible door through which the corridor is directly linked with the meeting room with windows on one side. In this way, all the details can permeate with each other in the space.

Besides physical boundaries, areas that are often neglected because of their functions or their positions in the visual fade zone can also become a kind of boundaries that are difficult to pass, keeping us in distance. In this space, such areas are everywhere – at the corner on the left of the entrance, the pillars and beams, the high and low edges of the partition walls, corners, etc. Therefore, we materialize them and give them some rhythm, making those meaningless shapes into “symbolic constructive elements” of the space.

In urban lifestyle, our spiritual perception about things and even ourselves are gradually degenerating. Then, the emphasis of the design is how to attempt to use the several “designing points” to arouse certain experiences in order to consolidate self-awareness while ensuring their functions. The wooden light hanging on the pavilion will lead you to the tearoom rather than other places that you are expecting, will you be disappointed and excited? The small waterscape linked to the outfall of the washbasin in the bath room will present the scene of “used water” from the outside when someone is washing hands inside… the revolving water tank, the three-dimension curtain, the bucket inlaid with tap, the hanging beam of towel and mirror, the case of stool, the wood bearing landscape desk, the staff desk-scape, etc., all those “designing points” are like those several impressive “events” in our life course, which we can remember its “experience”, but we cannot reshape its truth. Sometimes, we need to be left alone with “it”. We pile up all the fragments of memories in the space for people who will use it to have dialogue with.

Design makes significance on the basis of people’s existence. Only when we are “relating” to the space and objects in the space, could it exist and bring various experiences to people with its function. Here and now, we concern more about people’s experience, both physically and mentally.