Office: Wutopia Lab | ArchDaily

Verdant Ridges / Wutopia Lab

韩爽 - HAN Shuang — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 01:00:00 +0000

The site was originally home to the Xinguang Silk Weaving Factory. The renovated Building No. 5 has now been transformed into a versatile theater, seamlessly integrating Suzhou-style stage performances with medium-sized conferences. In architectural renovation, the common approaches typically fall into two categories: completely redesigning parts of the structure or preserving its original form as much as possible. Wutopia Lab seeks to break free from this binary and explore a new path. Inspired by the dramatic life of Tang Bohu, we go beyond merely preserving the historical depth of the old building—we breathe new artistic life into it.

Flickering Peak CP·SUN RIVER Art Gallery / Wutopia Lab

Andreas Luco — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 07:00:00 +0000

The story begins with the old routine of saving the day
The client was dissatisfied with the previous design of the art center. After the previous architect ran out of ideas, they approached me, hoping I could create a design that balances substance and visual appeal. The constraints were that the basement had already been constructed, so I could not alter the beam and slab structure types. The new building could not exceed the original structural load or go beyond the original building control lines.

The Lake House / Wutopia Lab

Pilar Caballero — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On February 28, Chief architect YU Ting was invited to survey three potential sites in the park and select one for the new pavilion, we need to provide a comprehensive design—architecture, interior, landscape, soft furnishing, and exhibition—aimed at achieving completion and public opening by April 18. The final site chosen was the former water base by the bay. The only restriction from the park was to preserve the structures of two existing buildings and not disturb even a millimeter of surrounding greenery, including two trees abutting the façades. Meanwhile, the client hoped to incorporate ceramic curtain wall panels previously used in residential developments.

Emerald Screen Pergola / Wutopia Lab

Pilar Caballero — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A wandering dragon-like Emerald Screen Pergola
Here the frailest leaves of me yet my strongest lasting.
Walt Whitman

Klein Blue Hills and White Cliff / Wutopia Lab

Pilar Caballero — Wed, 20 Mar 2024 02:00:00 +0000

There is a slender water line between the sky pond of the copper blockhouse and the red brick building. If you go along the water line you can trace its source hidden in the northernmost part of the EKA Park, Klein Blue Hills, and White Cliff, renovated from a roof-covered stockyard and a duty room. I planned seven locations for the park, hoping that their sequential opening would activate the PLOT of the park. As the focus of the park, there is a thin connecting thread behind the Copper Blockhouse. the Klein Blue Hills the White Cliff, and the Copper Blockhouse are a family, they are two of the seven locations. I conceived the PLOT through symbols, metaphors, mythology, charms, history, and spontaneous ideas. The knowledge I gained in selecting structures, materials, site analysis, and historical typologies served as a secondary framework between the PLOT and the design. I consider the Klein Blue Hills as Mr. Chen’s wife and my wife, who are suffering from illness. I hope they can live well. Cyan in the east, symbolizes vitality. This is why I intended to use the color cyan. My judgment is validated by the research in “The Golden Peach of Samarkand”, which confirms that WU Zetian used lapis lazuli to represent the sky.

Shanghai Book City / Wutopia Lab

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The bookstore is for those who do not read. In China, the number of people who maintain a reading habit is far less than those who do not read. The limited number of readers alone cannot save bookstores. Therefore, book cities need to be designed for more non-readers, enticing them to step into the bookstore. This way, they can save the bookstore. In China, the time spent by online users on their phones has far exceeded the time spent in offline physical spaces. Additionally, the prices of books purchased online are much lower than those in physical bookstores, leading to a loss of readers for bookstores. Therefore, I aim to allocate even just 1 hour from the 10 hours or 8 hours that some online users dedicate to their phones each day, enticing them to step into a bookstore with attractions not found online. This way, they can save the bookstore.

Fengxian Qixian Jesus Church / Wutopia Lab

Pilar Caballero — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

"What really matters in life is not what happens to you, but what you remember and how you remember it." ——Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Deep Time Palace / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The concrete palace designed by Wutopia Lab, namely The Eye of The Museum of the Palace Museum of the Manchurian Regime (Changchun), is the first decorative fair-faced concrete building in Jilin Province, the largest fair-faced concrete building in Northeastern China, and the largest thin-shell large-span earth-sheltered swept surface underground building in China, was officially completed and inaugurated on May 18, 2023, International Museum Day, after six years of design and construction. Just before May 1st, 2017, Mr. Wang, the museum director who had vetoed more than 20 rounds of unsuccessful proposals, approached me with a request. He hoped that I could come up with a proposal that would truly capture the essence of Changchun. My career has always revolved around such urgent appeals, yet I gladly accept the challenge. Changchun was a foreign city to me, thus, I strive to embark on the brilliance within the fragments of the city's history.

DoBe WE @Shanghai Book City / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Mon, 05 Jun 2023 20:00:00 +0000

Iron Rain - This time, I want to bring back the heavy rain. We used 500 white aluminum plates of three different widths (160, 320, and 480) to create a randomized pattern based on my sketches, and simulated a downpour on the facade. The plates were perforated with randomly generated dots and dashes in Morse code, forming a message that awaits deciphering. To achieve the thickness of a real downpour, the aluminum plates were designed with three layers, cascading like a waterfall, and the outermost layer hides a canopy that maintains functionality while preserving visual integrity. Upon entering the lobby through the rain, the downpour continues. I also designed the steel bookshelves in the shape of raindrops, extending the visual vocabulary from the facade to the interior, creating a sense of continuity. To simplify matters, I used the term "steel" to refer to both perforated aluminum plates and steel bookshelves, hence the name "Iron Rain."

Copper Blockhouse / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Mon, 22 May 2023 01:00:00 +0000

Copper blockhouse · Full Metal Jacket - In 2021, I was invited by my friend Qiye, to design a central building in the center of the creative industry park that I renovated for him. However, we are both spaced out those days as our wives are facing a similar dilemma. We are distracted, yet tried to take our minds off anxiety by working, but it was hard to fully concentrate. Various possibilities of functions such as clubs and cafés were vetoed, as these ordinary functions cannot convince the two middle-aged men who were in panic. Eventually, we agreed on a multi-functional spiritual fortress as the central building. I said to Qiye that we needed to justify our existence, which was impossible for successful commercial development to achieve. The museum is the church of the modern age, and it might settle our disturbed souls. Therefore, we used the museum as the base of the work. Nautical machinery and ships are huge metal objects, therefore, I decided to build the building entirely of metal, and copper was chosen in the end. I am superstitious that metal shell is strong enough to protect our frightened souls.

Zikawei Library / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Sun, 30 Apr 2023 02:00:00 +0000

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world. -- Dead Poets Society (1989)

Zikawei Library: Basilica in the library - At the beginning of 2023, the Zikawei Library, designed by Wutopia Lab for four years, was officially opened. Coming to be the most sensational cultural landmark in Shanghai, it was also the first time that the project was known to the whole city before the official announcement from the studio. Now, this article is more like a summary instead of its unveiling. Before it became the Zikawei Library, the building was designed as a bookstore by David Chipperfield Architects. Unfortunately, just after the facade and the structure of the building were completed, the building was left vacant. After two investments of the bookstore had bowed out, this building was eventually designated to be the public library in Zikawei District and named the Zikawei Library.

Piazza in a Room / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Coffee and Shanghai - You can find Japanese, Korean, American, Taiwanese, or Southeast Asian cafés, and you can even find a run-down but proudly maintained 1980s Taiwanese Japanese café on Yongkang Road, but there is no such one that represents Shanghai. However, Shanghai has a long history of cafés. In Eileen Chang's essay "Double Voices" published in Tiandi magazine in 1945, she began by saying that when she went out with her friends, no matter what they did, they would always end up in a café. At that time, cafés in Shanghai were communal spaces in the city, serving beverages and snacks, but they could also be dancing halls, meeting rooms, libraries, information centers, and everyday social places.

Monologue Art Museum / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Wed, 03 Aug 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Wutopia Lab has been commissioned by Sino-Ocean Group to create a monologue art museum on the park green of SEATOPIA in Beidaihe, Qinhuangdao, dedicated to an infinite minority of people who want to be free from worldly distractions. It was completed and opened to the public in July 2022. Queen Dido created the great Carthage by cutting cow skin into thin strips and circling a piece of land. In an open green space at the intersection of three residential clusters in the Weilan Coast campus, I broke up the 1,300 square meter building into different monoliths combined with walls, corridors, and ambiguous spaces into a triangular-shaped 3,600 square meter place, the Monologue Art Museum.

Building 3 for Fortune Art Homestay in Xiyaotou Village / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this project in Xiyaotou Village, I confronted my identity as a stranger in the village and expressed a simple and direct gesture of how to understand or change the local landscape or activate local life as a stranger. It is a bit rash, but I consider the locals and strangers on an equal footing. So, I named this homestay design “Strangers”.

Duoyun Bookstore in Huangyan / Wutopia Lab

Yu Xin Li — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 06:00:00 +0000

Getting Up. The beginning of a design can be based on a mood. I envied the tranquility and pleasantness of this city, which is scarce in Shanghai. Suddenly, I decided there should be a cloud, calmly and slowly rising over the river. Clouds have a sophisticated and pure beauty. Rather than perform cosmetic surgery on a collage of cluttered commercial territorial façades, I decided to wrap them in a continuous white perforated aluminum panel wall. The continuous white creates a complex and pure interface on the riverside (by controlling the perforation rate, the façade creates a cloud of layers) hiding the bookstore. The aluminum wall is the façade, or it can be stripped away to become a courtyard enclosure or both. The continuous white aluminum wall is used as an addition to create a serene and pleasant visual subtraction. A cloud rises over the riverside, and the readers of the bookstore are in the cloud.

Toyou Bookstore / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Fri, 11 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Er You's backstory. The name of the bookstore and the concept came from the creative happenstance of Mr. Lin Feng of CIFI Group. The bookstore's philosophy that takes books as mountains, poems as books, flowers as decorations, tea as fragrance, and wine as a companion, forms the spirit of the entire bookstore. If “Er You” (in Chinese character) add a dot, it becomes the character “wine”, this is a magical touch to link the concept and life together by Lin Feng, both a book and wine lover.

The Satori Harbor / Wutopia Lab

罗靖琳 — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 21:00:00 +0000

This November, Wutopia Lab completes the Satori Harbor, a culturally symbolic library situated in VIPshop’s new headquarters. In Master Zhuangzi, the word Satori (Zhaoche) describes a state of transcendental being in the practice of Taoism, as the morning light shining across the entire earth.

White Upland Installation / Wutopia Lab

Collin Chen — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 07:00:00 +0000

Shanghai Huijian invited Wutopia Lab to design a welcoming stage in front of the sales center of their project in Huzhou. The only request from the client was to make it different. We can design the façade of the sales center but keep the interior unchanged.