HONG Designworks was invited to conceive ECCO’s Office in Xi’an, China. By drawing inspiration from the continuous movement of nature and rhythm it generates, the design team created a series of dynamic scenes that fit into the brand’s values, and integrated natural ambience, rhythm and positive state of life within the space.
Set independently at one side, the brand logo wall is in pure white and complemented by soft light. Besides, the designers extracted elements from mottled old city walls of Xi’an, and combined them with ECCO’s spirit of leather innovation, to create a leather brick wall with mixed colors in the reception area. Leather bricks of different colors correspond to distinct phases in leather making, and echo the appearance changes of Xi’an city walls over the last several hundred years.
Henry David Thoreau once praised Walden Lake as a teardrop of the God, and hence evoked numerous people’s yearning for lakeside living.
Everyone has a lake in their mind, which brings them serenity, poetry and purity in the bustling city.
Lakeside living, ideal life
Living beside lake is amazing, which enables people to get close to nature and enjoy a peaceful life. As embracing the first light of the sun in the morning and overlooking the rippling waterscape, the mood is refreshed.
Besides a well-known architect, Le Corbusier is also a chromatist. He emphasized many times that colors played an important role in space. Based on his masterpiece Architectural Polychromy, he summarized two colour collections in 1931 and 1959, with 63 colors arranged in different spatial moods. In the article “Purism” he co-authored with Amédée Ozenfant in 1920, he mentioned that shades could be arranged hierarchically and defined the first range of colors as “la grande gamme”, which consists of hues such as ochre, red, brown, white, black, blue, etc. and of course their derivatives. According to Le Corbusier, those shades are stable, powerful and capable of holding the canvas because they can be mixed harmoniously; those are essential colours that can be utilized in all great eras; and those are the ones necessary to express the sense of volume in painting.
Erecting in the magnificent ancient capital Xi’an with a modern and stylish gesture, Sunac · Grand Milestone Modern Art Center appears like a large crystal “gift box”, which brings amazing fashionable touches to the land featuring a long history and profound culture. It aims to become a city landmark, and to lead the trend of the era.
Director Ang Lee talks about movies in this way, “I think we directors are just like conductors. We sense something and then convey to the public through ourselves, stimulating their emotions, imagination, and thinking. This is what we say about making a film. ” This collaboration with FAB Cinema made me suddenly realize that as a designer, I also seemed to be a space director. I felt the power of life acting on me and cut out beautiful freeze-frames and close-ups, fabricating unreal dreams, mobilizing and stimulating the audiences’ emotions and imagination, and then conveying them through the carrier, space.
Xi’an, the ancient capital of 13 dynasties, features the integration between a civilization of thousands of years and modern lifestyles, which gives the city unique charm.
The project E Pang Bookstore is located in Fengdong New Town, Xixian New Area, Xi’an, which is named for the Epang Palace nearby. Fengdong, where the project is situated, used to be the administrative center of Qin Dynasty, and nowadays has become a core area in the development blueprint of Xi’an.
Since there had been no large-scale reading space within 5 km away from the site, the project was conceived to fill the blank. The designers tried to figure out what kind of bookstore was needed based on local cultural context and geographic importance of the site.
Encountering future
Situated within Fengdong Free Trade Zone, E Pang Bookstore is the first large cultural complex in Xixian New Area, with a total area of 3,500 sqm. More than just a bookstore, it’s endowed with the attribute of a library, which also functions as a carrier of public life and urban culture.
MDO have completed the first two of four office towers in Xi’an’s Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone. The towers are the 2nd phase of a larger office campus masterplan. At the centre of the new design is a landscaped park which acts as a green community focus for the entire campus.
A previous masterplan included all the office accommodation arranged in a single block, and MDO reorganized this area into 4 towers, creating more view corridors through the site and to the park, less overshadowing and better leasable office floor plates.
On the Xi’an International Horticultural Exhibition the West 8 designed Garden of 10,000 Bridges has opened to the public. As both a distinct sense of enclosure and vantage points are provided, the Garden plays with the sensation of surprise. In the design advantage is taken of the strategic, central position of the plot, and views to other parts of the exhibition are integrated with those to the features of the park and surrounding landscape.
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