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Architects: Sybarite
- Area: 370000 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Nick Kuratnik, Shihao Xiao, SKP
Text description provided by the architects. SKP is no stranger to creating firsts: ranked as the top department store globally and renowned as the most inventive operator for SKP-S in Beijing and Xi’an. SKP Chengdu will immediately become a landmark for fashion, tech, and art and a new milestone for the city. A holistic and collaborative project by Sybarite realized with James Corner Field Operations, Arup, Speirs Major Buro Happold, Eckersley O’Callaghan, and The Fountain Workshop,
At SKP Chengdu, nature, SKP (contemporary luxury), and SKP-S (next-generation luxury) come together to conjure an undeniable sense of interconnectedness: an ingenious combination of urban parks and underground buildings. SKP Chengdu is a TOD (Oriented Development): it creates dense, walkable, and mixed-use spaces near transits that support vibrant, sustainable, and equitable communities,
Casting our minds back to 2019, SKP-S successfully pushed and challenged what we think we know in retail terms by presenting the otherworldliness of moving to Mars in Beijing and the nostalgia of returning to a devastated Earth for rebirth in Xi’an in 2021. In continuance, Chengdu SKP-S proposes a hypothetical utopia where we can live in equilibrium through a Gate of Transition which opens up the ultimate in parallel time and space.
SKP Chengdu is a place shaped by familiarity, possibility, and instinct - a place of fierce optimism. It is where destiny is calling us. A story of the journey of humanity, the possibilities and challenges of endless curiosity, and captures our instinctive desire to explore.
There are many worlds within SKP Chengdu that reveal themselves upon arrival to the park and its botanical quilt of gardens: comprising 33 crafted landscapes and scenic spots in nature. Regardless of how many times you enter the park, you may never follow the same path - the stories you encounter will always be unique.
The magnificence of the SKP Park lies in an uninterrupted vista without a hint of what lies below. The parallel connection of the park and corresponding plunging architecture emerges as quarried into the landscape akin to a canyon as one descends. A sunken world of retail, hospitality, tech, experience, and art is constantly in motion, evolving and changing, yet underpinned by a common narrative – a celebration of diversity living under one ‘botanical roof’.
SKP Chengdu represents individuality in harmony and a parallel world where everything comes together to showcase what is possible in this journey from elegance to energy: SKP to SKP-S.
