上海 Kokaistudios 重塑购物中心，打造城市交流空间

Location: Shanghai, China

Designer: Kokaistudios

Client: Shimao Festival City

Floor Area: 58,000 Sq-M

Shanghai-based Kokaistudios 'upgraded' the existing retail components of the 58,000-sq-m Shimao Festival City shopping centre to create a 'useful public space of engagement and exchange'.

By reconfiguring circulation inside and outside and identifying clear pathways for different visitor types, the designers enabled the mall to reinvigorate its surroundings and reconnect with the city.

The conceptual model for the mall's renovation was a theatre and focused on the 'roles' played by three types of protagonists or patrons: tourists, 'audience members' and 'actors' who populate the 'foyer', 'auditorium' and 'backstage'. Starting outside, an external 'red carpet' guides tourists along a sky escalator on an experiential journey that circumnavigates the mall and its big views, reactivating upper levels. Shanghai residents are the mall's 'audience' for whom it becomes a lifestyle destination beyond its commercial purpose. They use a street-level entrance into an attractive wood slat-flanked atrium that extends the mall's height and adds LED columns to make it light, open and dramatic. Another entrance caters to 'actors', visitors who work in nearby offices, who are conveyed on an escalator directly to the heart of the mall, a 'backstage' area with a swank but industrial look: grey louvre walls and polished black glass.

The project illustrates the fact that architectural renovation of certain properties can also serve cities, as a whole, by retrofitting outdated spaces to suit current lifestyles, and making them more flexible in the future.

This space is featured in our title Learning from China: A New Era of Retail Design. Get your copy here.