Shenzhen Longhua Book City by ATELIER GLOBAL LIMITED
Name of Company or Individual: ATELIER GLOBAL LIMITED
Website: http://www.atelier-global.com
Project Name: Shenzhen Longhua Book City
Project Completion Date: 12/30/2019
Project Completed City: Shenzhen, China
Interior Division: Institution
Shenzhen Longhua Book City is the sixth Book City Building in Shenzhen with a ~46,000m² building area. It is set to become a new local cultural hub which is more than a place of reading, but also a place for innovative design workshops, leisure, entertainment, child education, and commercial. From design initiation, we hope that the design would be able to provoke dialogues between different mediums: between nature and people, art and culture, space and sensation, et cetera. By looking into the past, present and future of Book City culture, our design aims to rejuvenate the daily life of citizens and help them to rediscover the joy of reading by bringing them a brand new reading experience, through a smart architecture that can breathe (natural ventilation), grow (flexibility), and understand the needs of readers (interactive).
Shenzhen Book City has started a revolution of living through reading in the past 20 years, and today they are bringing on another revolution. What is represented in our architectural and interior design in this project is not the physicality of books, but the cultural lifestyle that is brought forward by reading. Void spaces intercross three-dimensionally and create dialogues with the surrounding context at every corner of the building. With such spatial arrangement, the program rooms and void spaces can interact with each other, and even enable future possibilities for the program rooms to expand in the long run. The infrastructural setup allows the architecture to grow in time with changing demand in the Book City’s operation.
Throughout the height of the building, we have dotted a series of interactive spaces in various sizes, all connected by a spiral circulation. Walking up from the basement exhibition hall to the rooftop garden, the journey is characterized by the interaction of space with people, with books, with nature, with sunlight, and with the mind. By carefully maneuvering visitors through the interior into nature and back, we hope to bring a breathing architecture to the city and awaken the public's engagement with their very own cultural venue.
The Project took nearly two and a half years from initiation to realization. During which we have slowly progressed to making a distinction of The Longhua Book City in comparison with the previous five Book Cities. The project is more than just a book store; it is designed to be a creative platform, a cultural platform, a sharing and display platform, experience platform, and also an intimate place that citizens in Shenzhen can identify with, and grow together with for generations.
Plans
