Shanghai, China
Wutopia Lab has designed a spacious, three-story central atrium featuring deep alcoves, creating mezzanine floors on both sides within a building designated as a public library in Zikawei District, Shanghai.
The Zikawei Library is designed to be the most sensational cultural landmark in the city.
The building was designed as a bookstore by David Chipperfield Architects.
Unfortunately, just after the façade and the structure of the building were completed, the building was left vacant.
The architects have developed a new spatial narrative based on the characteristics of the project to implant or dissolve the original architecture, thus creating a nouveau experience known as magical realism.
The original building has a three-story atrium with a mezzanine on both sides.
This classical atrium occupies the center of the central axis.
Wutopia Lab wanted to avoid this classical-centered narrative, nor do they want to completely neglect it.
In his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, Robert Macfarlane observes that the burial of uranium waste from nuclear reactors: people seal the spent uranium cores in zirconium rods in copper columns, which are embedded in iron cylinders, at the same time, iron cylinders encased in bentonite slurry, and finally store them deep underground in rock formations, thousands of feet deep in gneiss, granite, or rock salt.
This seems to be a common procedure in human societies to preserve important objects.
This is the structure of the “Chinese boxes within boxes” with its nested layers, which inspired the architects to implement the classical-centered order as well as create a new narrative.
They have created a “Chinese nested box” structure in the Zikawei Library, which is derived from the traditional Chinese trousseau box in the Han Dynasty.
The architects have described the first layer of the box with a thin façade designed by David Chipperfield Architects, while the second layer consists of the main programs of the library such as coffee, various reading areas, lecture halls, and exhibition halls.
The third layer consists of a donut-shaped aisle and the fourth layer comprises an atrium that serves as the library’s reading hall.
The central part of the library is the last protected treasure of the “box structure.”
This narrative structure translates into space, where the second and third layers can be seen as part A and the fourth and fifth layers as part B.
As for the outermost façade as the outer skin of the set, the inner set can be expressed independently in design without being influenced by its architectural language.
And the treasure on the fifth layer does not constitute a spatial meaning, but it does exist to complete the symbolic meaning of the box set.
Then what could be the treasures collected in this set box?
Since the Zikawei Library was once going to integrate the Tou-Se-We Museum, the pagoda from the Tou-Se-We was introduced here.
As a library, it should also contain its own iconic representation, a reading table. We put in a reading table which is close to 30 meters, the longest in Shanghai.
Together they both reinforce the central axis, also becoming the most important treasure in the Chinese nested boxes.
According to Wutopia lab’s dualism strategy, once the two main structures of A and B are sorted out, parts A and B can be used as opposing sentences of each other.
A, as a packaging set of boxes, can express solidity with concrete, terrazzo, and paint. B, as a storage set box, can express lovingly with the warm wood tone.
On the second floor, the cafe is a round island, the children’s reading area is a round centralized seating reading area, and on the second floor, a stained glass box taken from the glasswork of Tou-Se-We is embedded as a resting area.
On the third floor, the skylight left by David Chipperfield Architects combined with lighting is designed as a resting sofa between the second and third layers of boxes.
The mezzanine on both sides of the atrium is designed as an intimate scale reading and display area.
This enriches the structure of the nested layers. In order to strengthen the visual, at the junction between the two areas, the flooring and ceiling are made beside, so that the two areas could each form an independent visual expression.
The second area, where the treasures are collected, exhibits a sacredness. In this regard, the architects borrowed the basilica, a typical spatial type of Catholic churches in the neighborhood of the library, to sanctify the atrium.
The Zikawei Library is the public library in the Zikawei district, rather than a research library. It should be designed to build a stronger connection within the community.
Therefore, instead of a closed and inward-looking cultural place, the Zikawei Library should be more welcoming, not only to attract people who read but also to those who don’t.
The atrium showing from the façade would be a good opportunity to welcome people.
The studio designed the atrium to be a warm lighting open space, visible through the colonnade behind the translucent facade, to offer a soothing island for people who travel in the unsettling sea of the metropolitan.
“The openness in a library should not jeopardize the reading experience, therefore, we took advantage of the wide balcony left by David Chipperfield and changed it into a step seating area to provide more public reading spaces,” says the studio.
The client asked for a cantilevered balcony from the colonnade, which would break the rhythm of the original façade so after research, the studio designed a tiny step on the side of the balcony on the second floor for people to step out.
This tiny step provides a vast view into the city, as if in the air, just like the tiny step we took to change our whole perspective on life.
Project: Zikawei Library
Architects: Wutopia Lab
Principal Architect: Ting Yu
Project Manager: Shengrui Pu
Pre-Project Architect: Mingshuai Li
Post-Project Architect: Shengrui Pu
Library Phase Design Team: Qinghe Kang, Xueqin Jiang, An An, Jun Chen, Shaofen Chen, and Jing Wang
Photographers: CreatAR Images