Chinese real estate developer Yango is building an Intelligence Base, nestled in an undulating forest landscape, in Shanghai’s western district of Songjiang. With the Chinese Academy of Sciences as its cooperation partner, the basetargets companies positioned at the interface of AI and the neurosciences. For the Sales Center, we have designed an organic experiential space toillustrate this interconnectedness between people, nature and technology. Thus visitors are brought into direct contact with the project and its intrinsic vision – they not only receive and absorb, but participate in it actively and immediately.
The upper floor houses art installations, designed to render the project directly tangible. The ceiling lighting consists of small, custom-made acrylic lights that resemble human neurons. We use the ceiling design to convey identity and personality, as well as to celebrate Yango’s collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Distinctive floor markers create a parkour of interactive experience stations that invite visitors to engage with the project themselves. The layout of the space is designed to steer the visual connections,and works by repeatedly showcasing different sections of the whole.
The audio-visual customer journey begins with a fusion of traditional painting and an immersive 360° experience. The installation refers to Sheshan, the highest point of Shanghai, directly visible from the Sales Center. Sound recordings of mountain fauna bring the unique location of the high-tech campus to life: surrounded by nature, working on technologies that benefit human health. We transport this mission into the interior design as a feeling of naturalness – visually, acoustically and haptically. A boulder from Sheshan opens a contrasting dialogue with the digital environment as an eminently touchable, primal object.
The Tree of Hopes is an interactive installation of light and vertical, slim LED screens, whose pillarsappear to grow through the ceiling and the floor. Visitors are invited to scan a QR code and carve positive messages into the tree’s‘digital bark’using their smartphones. The Sales Center is thus no rigid information centre, but acts as an organic, permeable membrane. The Intelligence Base lives from the ideas and visions of the companies located there, and offers a designable framework for the emergence of promising medical technology for the future.
The highpoint and culmination of the customer journey is a café and lounge area with a direct view of Sheshan. The colour palette expands here: in addition to blue, a vibrant green and orange emerge to convey vitality. Visitors are invited to let all these impressions sink in here at the bar. An illuminated ceiling picks up on the energy of the exhibitions, continuing it in a dense and precise way, while the floor-to-ceiling, sliding window front places the entire room in a direct relationship with the breath-taking landscape outside. Our Sales Center brings Yango’s vision, a symbiosis between nature and technology, to life.
Client: Yango Group Co.,Ltd
Team: Peter Ippolito, Dora Latkoczy, Halil Dogan, Wenso Yang, Kenny Chou, Ruth Calimlim, Sasha Zhang, Jiang Cheng
Technical Drawings: EADC
Lighting Consultant: Adding Plume Lighting Design
