office

The Santen Shanghai Headquarters is a four-storey office building located within a garden compound in the Former French Concession. The clients requested for a new concept for their Shanghai headquarters that would be radically different from their existing generic office space within an office tower. The design proposed to capitalize on the site’s garden and existing greenery, while proposing new concepts for the office of the future. [+]

The Celine Shanghai Office is located at the top floor of one of Shanghai’s premier luxury office buildings. Workspaces within such podium-tower blocks are often generic workstations within an open plan, with a scattering of meeting and enclosed spaces. Such highly internalized spaces lose all forms of connection to the city. This project attempts to bring back the city into the interiorized office. [+]

This project deals with issues of the natural and unnatural, of reality and simulacra. The clients had previously engaged SKEW to masterplan and design a series of arts related homestays at an emptied-out village sited in Tonglu, Zhejiang. The desire by urbanites to leave the city – in search of wellness, of respite, of nature – has given rise to an industry aimed towards packaging “authentic” rural experiences for consumption, and which is driven by government policies and a growing urban middle class. [+]

Usun Bio Lab reorganizes the traditional relationship between public spaces and labs that are kept out of view from visitors. Located in a production building in Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, the design organizes all the steps of production around a central social space, so as to encourage the mingling of scientists, technicians, and office workers. These new forms of social networks work towards strengthening the sense of corporate identity and stimulating innovation. [+]

FAST (Foreign Domestic Worker Association for Social Support and Training) commissioned a feasibility and design study for converting an old 1960s school into a new hub focused on servicing domestic workers. The hub comprises not only dormitories, but also spaces for recreation, training, and areas where these foreign domestic workers can get to showcase their culture. [+]

This proposed mixed-use development at Geylang Lorong 18 presents a unique opportunity for the Char Yong (Dabu) Foundation and Association to create positive synergies with its neighbours. The aims of this development are two-fold – first, to raise the profile and fulfill functional needs of the institution, thereby revitalising membership and attracting youth, and second, to expand public outreach and services provided by the institution, and future tenants to the community. [+]

The 2000sqm office design for Jollibee China entailed creating new, dynamic and youthful ideas for a food conglomerate eager to create better working environments for the staff. The space was relatively tight, having to fit close to 150 staff. We designed 7 social areas for the headquarters, each themed around an aspect of “home” - the foyer, bar, lounge, gym, study, library and dining. [+]

This urban masterplan project looks to the historical development of Xiegang in Dongguan, and its potential future as a site of heavy industry and node within a global network of supply and demand. This masterplan proposes that production not only stay within the city, but that it can be strengthened by creative reuse of existing networks, buildings, and skilled populations. [+]

The Lippo Plaza Business Club was commissioned by the owners of the Grade A office building in Shanghai, not only to provide new services for their tenants, but also to house their own offices. The project sits on the top floor of the tower, and comprises multiple meeting rooms, a flexible multi-purpose space as well as private offices. [+]

The original site comprised three slab blocks used for low-end production near Caohejing Industrial Park in Shanghai. This new design re-envisions these factory campuses not simply as hermetic industrial spaces, but highly enriched with cultural, commercial, office and residential spaces, thereby re-inserting industry within Shanghai’s increasing land values and efforts to push production out of the city. [+]

Shanghai has undergone rampant de-industrialization. Pengpu, a once heavily industrialized zone has seen many of the production spaces converted into offices, malls, residences etc in recent years as ways for the city to monetize high land prices. This masterplan seeks to maintain a level of hybridity and informality found onsite, while capitalizing on its proximity to other high-end offices and health facilities. [+]

Tianyi Office is sited at a previous Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation bearing-bush factory. Since moving production to Anting, Shanghai, many of SAIC’s sites have since been transformed into higher-value office campuses, retail or residences. This office is located in one such site that has been themed as “Health Valley”, focusing on healthcare, fin-tech and other associated businesses. [+]

Capitalizing on the unique topography of the site, the Shingwai Shaoguan Factory Campus marries production and office functions by inserting strips of programme into the steep topography. The building is an intersection of different users and redirects circulation, goods and workers to different parts of the larger factory campus – up the hill towards residences, east and west towards production sites, and south towards the entrance. [+]

Wanzhong Food Tower and Offices is sited in an original factory owned by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation (SAIC) and was converted into low-quality office spaces in the 1990s, through subdividing the 7-storeys into 10-storeys. Construction of the Yan’an Highway in the 90s further eroded the easement and green buffers of the site, resulting in an awkwardly oriented tower with undesirable frontage and a lack of public space. [+]

The Lippo Public Space upgrading project was a call to redesign the public spaces of a 39-storey building, in order to revamp the 20-year interior design. The scope includes all bathrooms, common corridors, as well as the ceiling of the elevator lobby, with the provision that any existing stone material is not removed. [+]

The Sectech Headquarters and Factory looks at a phenomenon where managerial offices are being pushed out of inner city Shanghai to the suburbs, with the assumption of cheaper rents and closer integration with production. Eschewing a typical separation between white-collar and blue-collar workers, the project seeks to create better relationships between staff and visitors. [+]

The ubiquity of tower-podium typologies in China may be tied to the increased density and rising land values in these rapidly urbanizing Chinese cities. However, the podium-tower typology poses its own inherent contradictions – these contradictions are particularly played out in the intersection between the upper private floors, and the lower public levels, where competing needs of the different end-users result in convoluted circulation and inefficient spatial buffers. [+]

The site for this new exhibition center and laboratories was the former 1962 Soviet-designed low-density office/factory cluster sitting amongst a heavily wooded compound. The complex itself came at the end of a period of Soviet-China cooperation, with the importation of technology and expertise of the former to the latter. The architecture of this adaptive-reuse project is predicated on strategic insertions of new forms and voids within the structural framework of the original complex. [+]

The series of three pavilions, named “The Roof”, “The Bridge” and “The Partition” are expansions to the existing work and exhibition cluster. Designed as follies, but cross-programmed with work and leisure functions, these small spaces add to the amenities of the creative campus. [+]

ESpace Phase II takes typical corporate villas in China as a starting point, while underscoring the tension of hybridizing work and living spaces within the typology as a result of zoning laws and increased center city real estate prices.  The accommodation zones are articulated distinctly from the work volumes, but are forcibly inserted into the latter, producing new sectional relationships. [+]

Jia Little Exhibition Center addressed two issues – that of architectural building practices, as well as the rise of global industrial complex, which inevitably results in the increased separation of producer, product and consumer. Both have ramifications on sustainability – the former translates directly to a building’s carbon footprint, while the latter precipitates in an alienated state where consumer goods necessitate massive amounts of energy to be created and delivered to the user. [+]

The client, a global sourcing company, was keen to engage sustainable building practices, as well as to showcase the space as its headquarters in China. The highlight of the space is a system made of renewable bamboo flooring that grew to create programmatic requirements such as meeting rooms, shelving, lighting, stairs etc. [+]

The white shelving system makes reference to Chinese Ming design, where we analyzed wood frames and lattice patterns commonly found in domestic spaces of the era, such as in furniture, screens and doors. This system therefore took the form of framed boxes that could change in scale and aggregation. The fractal boxes variously became storage and partitions, or “disintegrated” to become viewing portals and lighting fixtures that enliven the otherwise minimalist space. [+]

The project called for consolidating a strong brand identity for the Chinese Headquarters of the Sony BMG, while maintaining the most efficient open office layout.  The intervention onsite comprises a new social condenser in the form of a highly sculptural meeting room space, which simultaneously frames the view from within, and provides visual impact for guests waiting in the reception area from without. [+]

Located in the famed Shanghai abattoir redevelopment project, 1933 Millfun, the design of the Dacra Global Office sought to combine the unpolished, raw nature of the industrial found object with a sense of refinement required of the work environment of the US-based company. The primary design element, a delicate white ribbon, was woven through the long space, thickening and wrapping around itself to create new programs and work zones according to end user requirements. [+]