Inventronics Tonglu Production Factory (Phase1) / GLA

Curated by 韩爽 - HAN Shuang

Architects: GLA
Area: 73888 m²
Year: 2017
Photographs:Li Yao
Manufacturers: Wienerberger, Arrow, CSG, Kohler, RINCON, TAIWANGLASS, Toto, XYG, YUANTAO

Binary Sites and the Strategy of Appearing and Disappearing
The Inventronics Tonglu LED driver production base is located among the beautiful landscapes of Fuchun Mountains depicted in Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains. The land is adjacent to the No. 320 national highway linearly, and is approximately 4 kilometers away from the main urban area of Tonglu. The site was originally a suburban village and farmland, but in recent years, with the urbanization process, the interior and exterior of the site have presented two different looks – the neat and uniformed industrial park in development beyond the red line and the quite rustic and primitive fish ponds, tea mountains and other farming civilizations within the site form a sharp contrast.

The Phase I cluster of the project has been completed and put into operation, whose contour is relatively square, with flat ground, and surrounded by roads; the Phase II land in construction in the north side includes ponds, streams and tea mountains, where the environment is beautiful featuring comely landscapes. The binary site conditions necessitate the collision of large-scale industrial production logics and the organic natural environment, activating the design scheme of the unity of opposites of appearing and disappearing.

On the one hand, the production process line of the project needs to meet the requirement of 30-40 meters in width and 150 meters in length for each line, which also determines the huge scale of the basic production unit. In combination with the characteristics of land use and logistics-freight and other functional logics, in order to preserve the natural features of the Phase II land as much as possible, the design balances more of the production functions to the Phase I cluster and the Phase II land area that presses close to the external urban roads, thus forming the super-scale architectural boundary facing the No. 320 national highway and the urban branch roads.

On the other hand, as a core strategy to resist industrial erosion in nature, the supporting living area of about 40,000 square meters adopts the landscape treatment method of blanking and retreating, and it is arranged in the vicinity of the boundary of the north side of the land, surrounding the tea mountains and fish ponds. The buildings and the mountains join in each other naturally and merge organically. The moderate intervention of human life and the continuation and preservation of nature collides at this place; the looming buildings and the people living and working here will likely form an interesting prospect of a new type of industrial cluster.

Large Scale Interface and Flowing Inner Courtyard
As the beginning of the overall layout of the project, the Phase I land has a national highway interface of about 330 meters, which accounts nearly 1/3 of the total length. And it is planned that all the areas in the land shall be arranged as production units. The design creates a rectangular space by enclosing the production units as a whole, shielding the noise interference of the national highway from the outside, and forming a stable and quiet environment inside the park. Facing the bustling No. 320 national highway, the four-layer production units are arranged in succession to form a super-scale boundary of 20 meters high and 330 meters long. The stream of vehicles and people to and from the city show the sense of power and presence of modern industry.

As the beginning of the overall layout of the project, the Phase I land has a national highway interface of about 330 meters, which accounts nearly 1/3 of the total length. And it is planned that all the areas in the land shall be arranged as production units. The design creates a rectangular space by enclosing the production units as a whole, shielding the noise interference of the national highway from the outside, and forming a stable and quiet environment inside the park. Facing the bustling No. 320 national highway, the four-layer production units are arranged in succession to form a super-scale boundary of 20 meters high and 330 meters long. The stream of vehicles and people to and from the city show the sense of power and presence of modern industry.

The convex auxiliary space is divided into a plurality of curved elements, which constitutes a flowing inner courtyard interface. The supporting functions such as meeting and management are interspersed in forms of convex glass boxes, which weakens the monotony of elevation standard units that have extremely strong logicality.

Material Characteristics and Construction Technologies
The continuous urban interface facing the No. 320 national highway provides the architect with a huge canvas for painting. The design highlights the painting image of Huang Gongwang’s Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, attempting to make a huge abstract landscape painting on this super-scale interface.

The design uses hand-made terracotta bricks with good physical properties as the base material of the project. The four-layer bricks are stacked in groups and misaligned to form a super-scale red “canvas”. In the brick hole, the light and shadow changes formed by different masonry effects such as rotation and filling are used to simulate the painting techniques of Chinese traditional painting, namely, lifting, outlining, foreshadowing, and shading.

The specially made terracotta bricks must undergo a secondary processing in order to be dismantled into the basic units required for construction. The random cross-section effect formed during disassembling is mixed with the smooth effect of the original bricks to create a wall surface with different level of roughness and different shade intensities, further enriching the visualsense of layering.

The logically clear and diversified brick building techniques and construction techniques abstractly reproduced the “mountain” image in the Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains on the south main facade of the building, and constructed a delicate and vivid trans-boundary artistic expression.

Multi-layer Superimposition of Cavalier Perspective
Traditional Chinese painting is a kind of artistic creation based on scatter perspective, and its flatness contrasts with the true visual depth of human beings. The architect tried to combine the characteristics of the site to reproduce this non-daily flat visual art effect by superimposing multiple layers of visual elements in deep space. The design takes the distant mountain background of the site as the natural distant view, with the brick building texture of the building facade as the middle-shot of the picture, and the 30-meter wide green belt between the buildings and the No. 320 national highway as the foreground, and by heaping slopes, planting trees, group planting and other site processing and landscaping methods, a close-up view is reconstructed that people is able to walk into and to perceive and experience.

The “accessible” close-up view, the “visible” middle-shot and the “distant” background combine to form different visual experience scenes from different viewing perspectives, and provide pedestrians and vehicles with strong non-daily visual experience.

Meanwhile, another expression of the whole project – the nature-oriented blanking interface of the Phase II project, is still carefully carried forward in the guiding ideology of protecting the site ecology. For today’s emphasis on industrial upgrading and the importance of new industries, this Phase II industrial cluster that is organically integrated with the natural environment may have greater practical significance.