Beijing Cultural Innovation Park / COBBLESTONE DESIGN

Curated by 韩爽 - HAN Shuang

Architects: COBBLESTONE DESIGN CANADA
Area: 11500 m²
Year: 2015
Photographs:Yijie Hu
Lead Architects: Tingjie (Peter) Liu

Text description provided by the architects. The renewal of all industrial plots is accompanied by the dual renewal of industry and space. However, the content organization under the industrial orientation is often dynamic and unfixed, so the spatial form needs to continuously reflect the value of the potential content. The goal of renovation and design of “Shouxing Innovation Workshop” is to build the communication spaces and venues which is adapted to potential domain functions by reorganizing the site and content, interface, and texture of building, that is, strive to provide display, exchange, investment and financing services, office and leisure supporting platforms and venues for technological and cultural innovation enterprises. Communication is a keyword composed by functional media, crowd behavior and space.

The project is located in the China New Media industrial Park at the southern end of the central axis of Beijing,about 16 km from Tian An Men.The park was first established in the 1990s as a traditional industrial Park.In 2005, it was approved as the base of the new media industry in China,and became a professional industrial agglomeration area dominated by new media industry.According to the material control plan 2013,there are more than 80 industrial enterprises in the park of the industrial structure will be converted to cultural creative,services,information,digital industry,commerce as the main content of the high-tech.The construction space and industrial material strucure face double renewal.The project area was belong to Beijing Yongan heating Co.,Ltd, built in the early 1990s,and has been abandoned.

The project positioning "innovaton works"conforms to the control regulations and future development needs.The original building is 8000m2, and after the transformation,the building scale is 11500 m2,the floor area is 4200 m2,the layer number is 2-4 floors,the total height is 24m.It is mainly used for business,art exhibition and creative office.

“Communication”- intersection and interaction, which can penetrate into the spatial interface, facade muscle, industries, information exchange, interpersonal behavior and emotion, and has the dual meaning of content and form, and innovation fits.

The principle & proposes

1. Planning a universal place and space because the enterprise in the future investment process there is uncertainty.
2. The site functions, interfaces, and streamlines are rebuilt and integrated.
3.Through reinforcement, reconstruction and extension measures to reconstruct the functional streamline and space sequence.
4. The architectural form of distinguishing and new media industry features are built. 5. Proper retention of traces and memories related to old industrial buildings.

Strategies and methods

1.Site organization: the extended interface, function and streamline, a transformation from individual to place.
Original factory is a closed pattern, with streamline lines developed by coal storage, coal combustion, and heat transfer processes. We have classified and cut the site according to its future functions. Highly transactional and communicating streamlines is set along the open periphery. Relatively static treamlines of cultural activities, landscape space, catering facilities, etc., are set along the garth.Interfaces and streamlines are rebuilt and integrated,which inspire the vitality of site and achieve the transformation from individual to place

2. Architectural organization: there are two ways to change the function of the site and redefined space of the interface from the individual to the place in the continuous space of the content.
One is a stacked layer around the top of the West 1 trade show building, dominated by bulky buildings. The core point of contact in the middle and horizontal direction is an enlarged hall and atrium.The other is the relationship between the collage and bottom of the inner courtyard. These two paths produce a lot of intersections between space and site, and present the characteristics of communication at many points and surfaces, thus completing another transformation from isolated individuals to places.

3.Aesthetic strategy:Change from zero to integral: Structure and form, texture and repetition, reconciliation and contrast, script and scene.
The design language of the whole facade is influenced by technical expressionism and Italian rationalism. The whole facade along the street is designed with metal steel aluminum texture and fluctuating steel aluminum glass and other components forming a strong dynamic and strong material personality. The interior building of the enclosed site creates more warm and humane features with lower cost red brick veneer, which is contrasted and reconciled with metal. The chimney of the original induced draft fan room of Building No. 2 is preserved, and the facade with distinct rationalism characteristic is formed by the continuous design of the gable wall. The top of the sunken food plaza is covered with a continuous steel structure with irregular conical roof over the plain weathering steel plate surface, which is full of leaps and bounds in the enclosed inner courtyard, and also continues the aesthetic thought of combining contemporary and simple, and the space vitality and richness of the inner courtyard can be fully demonstrated.The contrast and harmony in different space and place produce unique visual and psychological experience with different scene movement and become the place of "innovation".