Kangyi Shen Studio | 沈康乂工作室
INTERIOR URBAN LANDMARK
NINGBO UNIVERSITY TOWN MICRO-REVITALIZATION
ABSTRACT
Kevin Lynch’s city is composed of five elements: “roads, nodes, regions, boundaries, and signs.” In shenkangXstudio’s view, the dessert store at the entrance of Ningbo University Town is a “sign” of attention, a "region" of public activities and a "road" in between indoors and outdoors. In this renovation project, shenkangXstudio used methodology of urban design to "plan" a passage converts in the interior space. The arch is the tectonic. Through the evolution of its own form, it unifies the spatial elements of different scales including architecture, furniture and products; the arch also points to the archetypes of traditional public spaces such as arcades and colonnades, allowing cafes to blend with urban activities. "Micro-planning" challenges the limitation of interior renovation project and blurs the boundary between interior and urban space. Arch as the design tectonic reconciles the two extreme scales and creates an urban landmark in the framework of interior design.
ABOUT PLACE
The store is located at the main entrance of Ningbo University Town. The west main facade faces the main avenue entering the university, the south facade faces the core plaza, and the north facade connects the store with a catering courtyard.
The predecessor design of the store used the west facade as the main entrance. The glass curtain and door is placed facing the narrow sidewalk, ordinary and unremarkable, and the details of the hardware interfere with the pedestrian's sight of the store. The tension after entering the room was limited in front of the bar counter, which occupied half the whole depth. The group of tables and chairs had to be squeezed in the corner at the end of the bar. A small window was opened on the façade facing the plaza, leaving a U-shaped corner that cut off the contact between the interior and the square and left a harbor for scooters.
△ Galerie Vivienne, 1823. Image from <the Arcades Project>.
Looking at the front hall cut out by the bar table, the plan looks like a tunnel between the main square and the courtyard, vaguely the thinking of a pas-sage couverts comes up and the concept of a public, urban, commercial linear space starts to develop. The sociologist Walter Benjamin wrote "The Arcade Project" on the topic, and the social phenomenon that made him anxious at the beginning has become a daily pastime for people.
The spatial association based on typology and image lead the interior planning to the passage couverts. The design proposed a micro-planning scheme that opens on both the north and south sides and connects the interior and public space. The main façade in the middle has both the programs of seating device and window display.
ABOUT TECTONIC
During the time in University of California Berkeley, the concept of tectonic came in my mind for the first time. Instead of basing on structure or construction, tectonic can also be a form of unit that constantly repeats itself, com-posing freely in proportions and methods. The space of tectonic is abstract, like pixels. It has strong integrity, theme and great impact. It can also strip off visual interference from different forms by emphasizing single element and narrate the concept more purely and clearly.
The Passage couverts, first created in Paris, wasn't much left after the Ottoman city in the mid-19th century, but its dominated arch represents the start of a new age and a new way of life -- as a monument of the classical and modern divide. The arch element was also refined to reinforce the concept of the pas-sage in the interior microplanning. Arch as a local architectural language never absents in the traditional style dwellings from south to north China. However, it still looks like alien elements on the site in the group of new Chinese style buildings with modern rectangular apertures. Arch as a local form plays an alien role within the alienized local context.
When the clue of the arch was sorted out, the memory in Europe began to call back, the roof of Basilica (the suspended ceiling of the card seat), the facade of the Roman theater (continuous door and window), the colonnade of the medieval monastery (downlight and bar ceiling). The combination of tectonic and image began to correspond to the functional requirements of store doors, counters, private rooms, ceilings, and lighting one by one.
ABOUT INTERIOR LANDMARK
The store is located at the junction of the vehicle road and pedestrian at the main entrance of Ningbo University town like a street sign. Due to the con-strain of the site and budget, making full use of the location itself by focusing on form, color, material and lighting is the only option to stimulate the potential of the project to a landmark.
△ <Saint Jerome at His Study>, Antonello da Messina, 1475
The painting above is <St. Jerome in the Study> by Antonello Messina. The study in the painting is located in the center of a Gothic hall. It is an independent space where people can move around in freely but it is also a piece of furniture, which derived a theory of The Furniturization of Architecture.
In this space in Ningbo, due to the limitation of interior project and the need to create landmark, the hard and soft furnishings (including furniture) in the space are expected to break through the interior boundaries and join the streets and urban space. So here the theory of architectural furnitureization is reversed to The Architecturization of Furniture. The lamps are assimilated as colonnade, the suspended ceiling is assimilated as dome, and the backrest of the sofa is assimilated as arch. The round bar stools and round take-out boxes echo the circular aluminum plate perforations and are assimilated as an arch and its reflection. Looking from the outside of the store, the jagged arch behind the continuous arch window, and then the arch that appears in the window extends infinitely to both sides. The west main facade is like a 3D collage composed of various surrounding products of arch.
ABOUT MATERIALITY
A major difficulty in small space design is from the equipment that cannot be avoided, like a sparrow with a compact system of organs. A four-door freezer, three consoles, and a ceiling air conditioner can easily destroy a 30sqm space. In the initial analysis of the site, the messy pipelines on the roof and eye-catching equipment in the back kitchen were the two main objects that need to be taken out.
In order to get rid of these obtrusive elements, the concept of arcade plays a role of isolation here, and the roof that was originally used to shield the commercial space from wind and rain is harnessed here to shield the mess on ceiling. The arched screen defines the passage between the two side doors. The deck and bar turn into shops on both sides of the street, and the back kitchen and roof pipelines retreat silently behind the two levels of spatial layers. In order to reduce the volume pressure of the screen, a translucent material is required to apply here. After testing a series of options such as metal mesh and rattan, perforated aluminum panels that can control color, scale and density are involved in the final design.
The holes on the aluminum plate can be regarded as a combination of two arches, which responds to the tectonic and abstracts the transparent purpose and the volume of the screen together. The gradual perforation with a diameter of 2cm to 5cm from bottom to top reduces the weight of the screen and interference of the screen at the height of the human view. The two-layer aluminum plate uses the difference in color and the dislocation of perforations to create the tension of materials, textures and lights. The inner white aluminum plate and the white terrazzo on the ground and the bar are rolled into a white opening to strengthen the spatial language of the arcade, and the pink aluminum plate is integrated with the environmental wall to weaken the thickness of the main body. Under the optimization of the aluminum pan-el consultant, six prefabricated flanged perforated aluminum panels with keel omitted were installed on site and fixed by slings on the wall and roof.
Morandi pink maintains its own gentleness after achieving the purpose of jumping out of the urban environment. The art paint is semi-polished on site, trying to restore the Venetian plaster, weakening its dark color and knife pat-tern but retaining the reflective and semi-transparent tension effect.
ABOUT LIGHTING
The pink at the scene is blended with red, white and yellow. Every time it went to the wall, there was a certain color difference, and the final effect was somehow yellow in the sun. So in terms of lighting design, white light was used to cool the overall environment on the four-meter-high roof. The top of the bar, deck, and cash register are decorated with warm light, which creates the effect of commercial street in the room. The white is like sky light, and the warm yellow on both sides is like the lights in the city.
ABOUT MODULE
The terrazzo bricks on the ground are the standard size of 600x600. In order to make the overall space orderly, all the joints between the materials are aligned in the design. And the base unit uses half of 600mm as the basic unit.
CLIENT：YUSHUO NINGBO
TYPE：ARCHITECTURE REVITALIZATION
LOCATION：NINGBO, CHINA
AREA：300SQF
YEAR：2020
AUTHOR: KANGYI SHEN
PHOTOGRAPHY：KANGYI SHEN