Comfort Ltd. Campus
Location: Zhongshan, Guangdong, China
Function: R&D, Production, Office
Surface: 27,000 sq.m
Date: 2019
Mission: Architecture, Landscape, Interior
Client: Comfort Office Furniture
Designer: Wau
As a manufacturer who intends to develop its own brand with higher quality, the commission is to design a new campus for manufacturing, product development, office, exhibition and related services. The project also needs to leave enough open space for two horses. The site is located in a generic PRD industrial district and around 270,000 square meters. The horse becomes the metaphor for ideal nature that merges in the industrial area. Therefore, the project starts to propose a natural garden inside the campus as the main strategy to provide better natural environment for people and horses.
The exhibition center and reception are arranged on the north and east side, facing the main road. The manufacturing space is located on the west. The other functions like canteen, building services and underground parking are located on the south. The arrangement therefore enclosed a 5000-square-meter garden which can be sensed everywhere. Above the garden, three office blocks span from the west to the east and set on two massive corridors. The inner garden and corridor becomes our main concept afterwards.
1. The Inner Garden
The central garden has two purposes. The first idea is to create a unique nature that is isolated from the outside. Secondly, the inner garden creates a new layers of nature which can be experienced from inside. The garden also refers to the philosophy of Chinese garden and Vipassana Meditation Space.
Chinese garden has a strong inspiration to create an inner-spiritual world. The inner garden is not only a physical space but also a place to enjoy the peace. By creating a large inner-garden, we hope people can be isolated from the industrialized urban context and feel the silence of nature.
Within this extremely large garden, the landscape is simply covered by wild grass and rough stone which creates the sense of wild nature. The office blocks above the garden with diagonal Anodized Aluminum Plate reflect the daylight to the garden. By walking in the garden, people could have different sense of nature according to the multiple scale and brightness of space. On the south, the garden level is raised up to 3.5 meters which allows enough space for underground parking. The raised horizon line also attracts people’s view point.
The client was once worrying that the office blocks, which cover the garden, would create a negative garden space. Therefore we used the techniques of VR to experience the space in 3D. The horse, garden and light are composed as a whole to create specific atmosphere. The nature is sensed through the voids in different scale. Within the garden, the communication between human and nature becomes ambiguous.
2. The Corridors
Besides the garden, two corridors are placed to enclose the nature. Each corridor has different atmosphere due to its scale. The corridor, as a form, not only defines the garden but also supports the stretched office blocks. The facility rooms and circulation area are also composed within the corridor.
In China, the corridor and garden are integrated as a whole. People can walk in different scales of space and experiencing the changing atmosphere. The nature varies from dark to bright, from tight to spacious and influences people’s sentiments between certainties to uncertainty. This is how Chinese garden interpret the relationship between nature and human being.
To the detail, the east corridor with slope connects the exhibition center, reception, canteen and central garden. When walking through a 4-meter wide and 10-meter height narrow space, it stimulates people to explore and extend their feeling to uncertain area. The corridor reminds me of the path in Wutaishan Nanchan Temple where people have to access the temple through an extremely narrow space and reach the temple in sudden.
3. Semi-open Interior
Most of the projects in WAU are located in Southern China. The specific climate is influencing our understanding of space, especially the sentiments between inside and outside. This consideration can be found in Wuchuan Industrial Park, W house and recent projects.
The traditional Guangdong housing typology, where I grew up, has a strong diversity in functions. The room besides the yard is always used with multifunction like kitchen, storage, tea house, etc. This is the place where family members like to gather and chat. The space is only enclosed by three walls and open to outside on one side. The voids on the wall frame the exterior landscape. Although the space is covered by roof, people are still exposed to the nature and could experience the flowing air and exterior climate. This is what I called “semi-open interior”. This specific traditional typology has been transformed and applied in most of my projects. Especially when artificial ventilation and building techniques has been applied in modern architecture, the sense of nature in interior space has been ignored.
We can still find the similarities of “Semi-open interior” in occident modern architecture such as Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, where architect composed varieties of space as a whole to create different sense of space from outside to inside. The same strategy can be found in Niemeyer’s projects, such as Foreign Ministry and Central Institute of Sciences in University of Brasilia, that the complexity between inside and outside is composed with nature. I think the “semi-open interior” reflects to our fundamental reaction to nature.
Back to this project, we used the inner garden and corridors to conduct multiple functions. It creates the complexity that people have more flexibility to experience and use the space. The discussion about “semi-open interior” doesn’t means to imitate the traditional typology but to extend the sense of nature from traditional architecture to modern architecture.
4. “Dry” Jointing
In WAU, white cardboard is used frequently in concept design stage. On the one hand, the efficiency provides additional time to explore more possibilities. On the other hand, the white cardboard model interprets very clear relationship between structure and space.
When I finish the 1 to 1500 scale model in early stage, I realized the potentiality of this methodology. Three white blocks with diagonal façade crossed over the garden and settled on the platform. The structure has two meanings in its tectonic fact that the white building strips works as roof to the garden and exterior wall to the office. The strips are over hanged between 5 to 12 meters to balance the bending force. It weaves the functions from garden to up floors and creates varieties of semi-open interior space.
The interpretation of tectonic joints is also applied in exhibition center where we use truss structure to pull the second floor slab. On the first floor, people could only recognize the single column. The curtain wall is completely freed without any column.
After we define the basic concepts of creating semi-open interior space and interpret the structure, we started to develop the project and settle down the facilities and construction details.