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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. UMBRELLA FACADE in Shanghai, China by 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIOJuly 10th, 2013 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO After the 2010 Shanghai expo the Madrid pavilion needed to be renovated and transformed into a commercial building with retail and office functions. The old façade was built around a 1.5m wide terrace all around the building with bamboo louvers mounted on folding steel frames.  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO
 Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO In 2012 the bamboo got rotten and the frames rusted so the Shanghai Expo Bureau decided to replace the old bamboo skin with a new façade that could work in the same way: allow the people to open or close the shades so to protect glass facade from the sun in summer and allow more light in during the winter. We were commissioned to find an eye catching concept that can follow those functions but also attract more people in the new commercial area.  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO If you visit China one of the first surprise you will find is that most of the women protect themselves from the sun using umbrellas and when actually rains most of the time they don’t mind to get wet without any protection. So when they asked us to protect a building in China from the sun this idea came up spontaneously: an umbrella façade.  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO The idea was to make each umbrella able to be controlled by a pulley so to allow people to interact with it. Apart from the pulley the rest of the mechanism is identical to the one of the umbrella with the only difference that the mechanical parts are made of stainless steel, the frames of aluminum and the external surface of thin corten.  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO When the umbrellas are fully opened the façade is completely flat so that most of the sun light and strong wind is blocked. If the umbrellas are opened the light is able to come fully inside and the umbrella sticks become attractive star-sticks with an aerodynamic shape not resistant to the wind preventing structural tensions in case of typhoons.  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO  Image Courtesy © 3GATTI ARCHITECTURE STUDIO
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