Office: Studio NOR | ArchDaily

The 798·751 Train Street Renovation / Studio NOR

韩爽 - HAN Shuang — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The "Train Street," located in the core area of Beijing's 798·751 Park, originally served as the coal yard and railway terminus for the 751 Factory. It was later repurposed into an underground garage, and after a dozen decommissioned train carriages were placed along the tracks on both sides of the garage's rooftop plaza, the site was opened to the public. However, the space subsequently suffered from a loss of vitality. Studio NOR utilized a lightweight, modular micro-renovation strategy, successfully transformed this passive, corridor-like passage into a vibrant community destination.

Jetlag Books Friendship Store / Studio NOR

韩爽 - HAN Shuang — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 19:56:00 +0000

1. Window and Landmark - The Beijing Friendship Store, located in the First Embassy District along the eastern extension of Chang'an Avenue, was the first large-scale special supply store established in China to serve foreign diplomatic personnel. As a unique window for Sino-foreign exchanges during the planned economy era, it gradually opened to the public only since the late 1980s. A symbolic landmark to generations of Beijing citizens, the store failed to adjust itself to the new Chinese consumerist market after the millennium, and its decline led to a comprehensive renovation started in 2023, in which the former service backyard was transformed into a commercial park, with Jetlag Books being the sole bookstore tenant.

Lucky Cookies Bakery / Studio NOR

韩爽 — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 23:00:00 +0000

The Lucky Cookies is a bakery specializes in traditional Chinese pastries. Located on the first floor of the famous Beijing Longfu Building, the site is a north-facing street shop with an area of only 37㎡. While the floor height reaches 5.7m, the main depth of the site is just less than 3m. The site's nearly 1:2 bottom-to-height ratio and its full-height glass curtain wall façade compress the store into a "display window": the entire interior space is visible at a single glance.

X Museum / Studio NOR

Andreas Luco — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

01. A Special Design Brief
X Museum was founded by two young collectors born in the 1990s, focusing specifically on new generation of artists and multiculturalism from a young perspective. The site for its new museum is an old warehouse located in Langyuan Station, an "Internet celebrity campus" filled with creative professionals, boutique stores and trendy restaurants. The design brief requires the new museum space should not only fulfill art exhibition needs, but also have the flexibility to hold various events and create "Instagrammable" spatial scenarios for social media publicity. Besides exhibition galleries, the brief also listed three commercial programs as major public spaces within the musuem that can be independently operated regardless of the museum opening hours: a gift shop, a café and a restaurant. The founders' expectation for the new museum is "a cool, comprehensive lifestyle place to embrace diverse possibilities.

Renovation of Birongwan Kindergarten / Studio NOR

Valeria Silva — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At the beginning of 2022, as one of the youngest design teams, we participated in the "100 Campus Renewal Plan" organized by Nanshan District, Shenzhen and renovated Birongwan Kindergarten. The construction was completed in just 40 days of summer vacation, and the campus has totally changed to a new look after renovation.

LVWA Bookstore / Studio YUDA + Studio NOR

Collin Chen — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In 2019, Studio YUDA and Studio NOR were invited by the Shanghai University of Sport and Shanghai Century Publishing (Group) Co., Ltd to design the first sports-themed bookstore in Shanghai, "Lvwa Sports Bookstore". Facing the base in the original rough state, the only spatial idea put forward by the owner is to make full use of the skylight atrium with a height of 17 meters to "build a landmark". This requirement, which usually only appears at the urban scale, not only clarified the core of the design but also changed the main extension direction of the bookstore space with only one floor from horizontal to vertical, sowing the seeds for our later formal concept.

The Aranya Jin-Sheng-Long Restaurant / Studio NOR

Collin Chen — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 01:00:00 +0000

The many walls
In early 2020, we were invited by Aranya Resort to design a branch restaurant of the esteemed Beijing restaurant brand Jin-Sheng-Long, which is known for serving Hot Pot and Quick-Boiled Tripe (a traditional Beijing street cuisine) since the 1890s.The site, located at the street level of a residential building, occupies the footprints of three originally proposed retail stores. As a result, there are at least 21 structural shear walls, either protruding out from the perimeter walls or standing independently, exist in this less-than-300㎡ site. This segregated spatial condition brought us a huge design challenge, for the client had clearly required an open-dining space without any private rooms, plus a bar area with an 8-meter-long table. Therefore, finding a solution to deal with the many shear walls became the key of our design process.