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Architects: RENGARCH
- Area: 130 m²
- Year: 2022
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Photographs:Junnan Liu, Yudi Gao
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Manufacturers: Jiangsu Futaoke Ceramics Co., Ltd. , Shanghai Longchi Building Decoration Engineering Co., Ltd., Shanghai Yuanwu Home Decoration Co., Ltd.
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Lead Architect: Rengran Zhang, Xintong Shi
Text description provided by the architects. The Q-factor store is located at No. 1, Lane 34, Xiangyang North Road, Jing'an District, Shanghai. The project along the street is part of a historically protected red-brick building. In consideration to protect this historic building, we were cautious when thinking about the project. There are a few considerations to think about. First, the architect’s goal is to protect the historic building while providing design updates to the current store facade. Second, to provide an interesting space with the limitation that the walls, floors, doors, and windows on the second floor cannot be altered.
Street "gradient." The street facade of Shanghai Lilong residential buildings often has a unique form of expression. As time goes by, the bottom floor of the street gradually turned into commerce stores. The previous store used a large-area glass opening which reduced the unique atmosphere of Shanghai streets. We intend to continue and update the current design with the concept of "pixel gradient”, where new brick is re-integrated with the street itself. The shop serves as the middle connection between the building and the entrance of the north alley, with gradual changes from the left to the right. We updated the outer wall with bricks, each with a width of 380mm, a height of 150mm, and a thickness of 28mm. We fixed the facade of bricks to cables so that it is separated from the block wall. Visually, the newly added red bricks along with the grey bricks provide a continuation of the original red wall and the grey dado.
Adaptable design. The first floor is used as a pop-up exhibition space facing the street, with an overall area of 30 square meters. There are two questions: one is to reserve enough space for future pop-up events; the other is that the space cannot look empty when there is no exhibition.
We designed nine small units, of which nine honeycomb cardboards of 300mm*300mm*50mm are glued up and down to form a unit. Small units can be combined up, down, left, and right into different forms to adapt to the changes. When the space is vacant, it can also form a matrix to fill the space and become a display stand.
Retractable wooden structure. The overall area of the second floor is close to 100 square meters, it is designed to include the store area, fitting room, toilet, and storage room. In addition to product exhibition and sales requirements, the store space also needs to adapt to various scenarios. We designed two sets of the foldable sliding wooden units to encompass the larger and smaller space on the second floor respectively. In the larger space, the width between the columns of the wooden unit is 2.5m, with a total of six pillars. In the smaller space, the width between the columns is 1.8m, with a total of four pillars. Each unit has a maximum span of 1.2m and it can be expanded or retracted depending on the need.
