CPI W-18b is a new small-scale commercial building located in the lakeside CPI commercial cluster in Chengdu. The owner hopes the building can seamlessly integrate with the lakeside, trees, and environment while creating a vibrant new commercial usage scenario with a sense of publicness.
The owner has raised questions on how design can better assist commercial scenes in achieving sustainable development and how small-scale commercial buildings can respond to demands for publicness. This presents an opportunity to delve into the relationship between commercial space and public space (publicness) as well as sustainability issues.
1. Public Space (Publicness):
CPI, as a "natural wild garden-style" standalone commercial cluster community, connects scattered individual commercial units through the aggregation of "public spaces" such as parks, squares, open spaces, sidewalks, waterfronts, and streets. While the community provides these public spaces, we believe that commercial units should also shoulder some public responsibility. Guests who are tired from walking should not only be able to sit on benches by the roadside but also be able to sit outside each shop. If each unit only pursues maximizing business area or strictly guards its boundaries, then the community will be fragmented, disjointed, and even composed of opposing segments.
Therefore, we have actively opened the building to the surroundings, forming new usage scenarios by connecting with the outside on each side, supporting and participating in public activities. On the north side, facing the inner lake, there is a circular walkway. The flow of people on the walkway is relatively noisy, so we have raised the interface and created a horizontal height difference to establish both near and far relationships, ensuring relative independence between inside and outside while allowing visual connection. Inside, people can greet passing friends, sit and gaze outside, and passersby can stop to rest. At appropriate times, the merchants can also display their goods. On the east side, at the end of the island, we have enclosed a quiet space for natural contact using stairs, the space below the second floor overhang, and several peach trees on the island. On the south side, a cement platform has been built by the lake. Future occupants such as kayak brands can wash their boats here, and guests and staff can also have more private conversations while sitting on a couple of chairs. On the west side, as one of the entrances to the building, we have created a mesh canopy around the trees, which can filter out some falling debris to form a gray space, and equipped with a bar space to support future outdoor activities such as coffee, alcohol, and music playback.
2. Light Structural Materials, Emphasizing Spatial Forms:
To achieve the above spatial ideals and enable more freedom and possibilities for the space, we have adopted a strategy of lightweight structural materials and emphasizing spatial forms in construction logic. The use of a 100*100-sized steel frame, sunlight panels, and pressure-regulated steel plates, among other industrial products, enables low cost, rapid construction, and compliance with green energy requirements. Under lightweight industrial materials, wooden materials are used for local beams and columns to create a cozy community atmosphere.
3. Sustainability:
The gap between the speed of information in modern society and the "time lag" of the real world has led to urban hollowness and anxiety. We hope to confront this anxiety by orienting towards sustainable development and creating buildings that are perceptive to the present moment and changes.
Mesh canopies are used for the building facade, not emphasizing the building's outline. Fallen leaves on the canopy become part of the building process and materials. The appearance of the building changes with the seasons, from green to yellow, and from sparse to dense,emphasizing an unfinished, evolving state. Combined with Chengdu's local climate characteristics, the boundaries between artificial and natural are blurred, utilizing tree canopies to form spaces, extending outdoor stone paving indoors, and bringing soil and small flowers into the interior. The facade adopts a multi-layered structure, with the outer layer's mesh providing permeability for environmental protection and energy conservation when the temperature is suitable, while the inner layer's glass sliding doors provide insulation and anti-theft features.
Conclusion:
Any form of commerce has a certain degree of public space attributes, and public spaces also possess conditions for commercial activities. They have a mutually beneficial relationship that needs to be verified. "Was the birth of urban public space invented or achieved through negotiation?" This question also applies here. Negotiation is a reciprocal change, and sustainability is an adaptive change. In this 10-year limited community, we aim to use these ten years to verify our understanding of sustainability and the reality of sustainability being "unsustainable (unchanging)".
