Text description provided by the architects. Renchang reading is a design driven company, through the spatial operation to deliver the high-quality cultural lifestyle. According to the emerging cultural consumption phenomenon to integrate the “entertainment, interaction and experience" in China, new retail mode is based on the Internet, through the use of big data, such as artificial intelligence means to reshape the structure of the online services, offline experiences with modern logistics. The design of the Quanmin Changdu bookstore (Lang Yuan park) with the “New Retailing” business mode, has won the 2018 "most beautiful bookstore of the year”, and becoming the cultural landmark in Shijingshan district of Beijing.
The bookstore is located in former antique market inside a sequence of courtyard house. With the change of Beijing's urban renewal strategy, the antique market calls for upgrade just like many collapsing urban spaces. By transforming one of the complete courtyards to form a new type of reading experience space, it is actually beyond the traditional sense of bookstore, but a cluster of urban living room and the new retail concept of the “ GENIUSLOCI”. It aims to build a concept of reading complex integrating distinctive design with diverse cultural experience and new consumption scenarios.
The original courtyard house of the antique market is not the traditional Gable wall timber structure, but the brick and concrete structure built in the 1990s. After demolishing the facade of original structure, the new design creates a sinking area in between the east and west side of the wing room, and connected the wing rooms with the glass curtain wall to form a massive continue space. In addition, a series of inner courtyards are set in this newly built sunshine room, including a circular courtyard and a long courtyard near the south, etc. This interspersed relationship strengthens the richness of the exhibited space and human flow line.
The bookstore space featuring welcoming-gesture creates an industrial large space with the twists and turns characteristic of traditional garden. The appearance of glass curtain wall does not affect the integral structure of original ancient building, which is open to the sky, and shows clear type rooftop outline. In addition to forming the atmosphere of reading books, the space also provides large and small study rooms, leisure space on the second floor and small sleeping cabin compartments. Moreover, several large open collection reading offices are added to provide different forms of reading.
In the vertical space, it makes full use of the interlayer space, and sets the change of different heights to obtain the place of privacy and sense of belonging, so that users of different age groups can find the space experience they like. To the south of the whole bookstore is an independent coffee lab, which can be transformed into a bar at night, forming a multi-functional and complex space. The concept of display and retail of cultural and creative products is integrated, emphasizing the transition of several different scene levels to achieve the symbiosis of reading and cultural space operation.
Under the trend of arising large number of new bookstores in China, Quanmin Changdu bookstore is to explore how to get out of the dilemma of traditional bookstores. Within the traction of the new retail economy, the higher requirement for cultural space is indeed the primary condition for improving thinking and behavior. When users of different ages reside here, the cultural blending will ferment in the bookstore, and finally reshape the space with unique content which cannot be copied.
