Confidential Advertising & Media Firm Offices – Beijing
AtelierTree completed a muted futuristic office with unique elements for a confidential advertising and media firm in Beijing, China.
By now, for creative agencies’ office spaces as reported, cases boasting “future, technology and digital” by dizzying forms have been almost out of fashion. By contrast, in the “Cyber White Garden” newly created by AtelierTree, a single white-washed, sharp-cut and at-hand material exerts a novel “sense of technology”.
Innovation is not exactly only visual aesthetics, and right in this sense AtelierTree aptly takes full use of the spatial characteristics of the site and integrates the traditional garden experience therein, presenting a “Cyber White Garden” blending the ancient and the modern .
“Cyber” doesn’t necessarily mean “punk”
Once transliterated into Chinese, “cyber” has become a hottest culture as embodying the information age and high-tech future bestowed by endless films and literary works. However, in AtelierTree’s opinion, “cyber” doesn’t necessarily mean “punk”.“In the development of the times, ‘cyber’ addresses a symbiosis that intertwines technology and humanity,” introduces AtelierTree their interpretation of human concern by pure white as an anecdote to darkness and neon. The very inspiration of combining technology and humanistic tradition comes from an active dialogue with the site towards full realization of the owner’s quest.
Creating A “Garden” Experience
While the site was so regular as restricted to a symmetrical central axis, AtelierTree cleverly transported the traditional garden experience into the spatial sequence.So far as the regular site goes, the designer identified and organized the spaces by distributing each office function along the central axis, while interspersing several spatial nodes in a meandering progression that evokes the imagery of the garden space.
Floating Pavilion As the Waiting & Reception Area
Once entering from the main entrance, one will find the main office via doorway on the right of the landscape vestibule. Beyond the opening left by the load-bearing wall, the spatial sequence makes its prelude with a pavilion as if to shelter the visitor into a garden.The disappearing “pavilion posts” blends the space into its surroundings, leaving the luminous roof float over, extend upward and subtly define the place. Once into it and looking back, one will find the landscape vestibule “framing a view” again, of the installation within the doorway, realizing the varying scenery with continuing motion in a garden.
Eaves Garden As A Public veranda
Behind the reception desk is a white translucent light box placed in the central axis, flanked with office areas on both sides that share it as the meeting room.The inserted “light box” as a meeting room thus functionally divides there into two office areas with a convergence point in the middle. Close around the conference room, formed a circular circulation highlighted with the garden imagery right overhead, namely a continuing eaves that vibrates with the open office as if the veranda in a garden.
On one side is the office, on the other the light-transmitting wall that separates the meeting space, while the floating eaves defines the circulation area, together forming a hierarchy of dynamic and static spaces that relieves one another into scenery during the user’s motion around.
Design: AtelierTree
Design Team: Casen Chiong, Huang Xiaokun, Zhai Shuoguo
Contractor: Beijing Giant Ant Architecture & Decoration
Photography: UK-Studio
