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Interior Designers: Whatever Design Office
- Area: 42 m²
- Year: 2019
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Photographs:Ri Ye
Text description provided by the architects. Looking around the whole mountain of Chongqing, and going through the marketing old streets of the city, the partners of Whatever Art Space met the fairy cave for the first time which is even rarely known locally. An old factory space, symmetry with the axis, suddenly appeared, the mysterious site environment with the imprint left by the former work of the factory. Almost in one second, it was set to be our design office.
The Chongqing Printing 1st Factory was built during the 1960s and 1980s and has stopped production for 30 years. In this hidden space of the city, Whatever Design hopes to establish a new way of working and create a connected space. It is not only our office, but also the tunnel of inspiration, and the container of communication as well.
Whatever Design office decided to build the interior with the local red bricks used in the exterior facade of the old factory, as a growth of the old factory inward. The sintering side with the lowest paving proportion was selected as the first material. Each piece of red brick presents unique overlying traces and colors on the side due to the different positions in the cave. Weeding out bricks with dark color, we in person picked out 10,000 pieces from the 30,000 pieces red bricks.
Whatever Art Space has naturally become the public space of the Chongqing Printing 1st Factory. It hosts art exhibitions and public events, installs video devices in the space, and connects the public and art in a friendly way.
Based on the floor height of the factory space, the interior is designed with a slope to show and interact both existing, which also makes the tunnel have multiple functions of an entrance, display, and storage.
In terms of visual design, we abandoned the most commonly used computer and made use of hand origami to overlie the entire vision system. Just like the handwriting left by the old factory, the unique traces made by hand are exactly "Whatever" look in the heart. Whatever Design believes that interesting peculiarity exists in unstable attempts and adventures, rather than fixed patterns.
The Fairy cave, Whatever Design office space and Whatever Art Space- become a central axis, creating a new way of working and putting art and design into it as a new container.
