Articles by Collin Chen

The condo is located in a high-rise residential building in Nanjing along the Qinhuai River, and the millennium Stone City Wall is on the north of it. The owner couple, who are about to retire, want to transform the existing standard three-beds condo into a residence suitable for retirement living. The design intentionally opens up the enclosed rooms and transforms the three-bedroom layout into one bedroom or as we can also call it: one garden. Original Linear circulation is reorganized into a looped circulation which makes one can stroll in the garden. Walking through the aisles with various functions, the framed view of the interior and exterior windows changes and enriches the sight constantly. It has the same spatial experience as living and moving in a Chinese garden. In the post-pandemic era, people spend a lot more time at home, interesting residential spaces have never been more important than they are today.

Shangen Village is a renovation project in Wenzhou, dedicated to transforming the once traditionally built village into a tourism destination. SpActrum left the project soon after we proposed the master plan during 2017-2018. The village has been hugely cleaned up since then but has lost some of its ancient ambience. The once charming chaos has turned into the blankness of purposeful building activity. The SpActrum team became involved again, aiming to recall and restore the power of ambiguity once felt on the site, and started to work on an empty plot by the village bridge.

Miwo Hotel is located on the top of a mountain in Suichang County, Lishui City. It is rich in tea hills and reservoirs and named after hot springs. It is a popular resort for tourists to spend their holidays there. The name “Mi Wo” hopes that the hotel can have the temperature of a home, and will come from far away guests, to enjoy this beautiful scenery. In view of the unique geographical environment of the hotel surrounded by mountains, the designer used white paint on the building, like an off-white tree nest, depicting the boundary between light and dark in the forest, creating a unique landscape standing in the mountains. From a distance, the hotel was faintly visible through the trees, isolated from the hustle and bustle of the city, like a hidden nest of white trees.

The project is located in Xuhui District, Shanghai. The design retains the original indoor lamps and top pipelines and uses simple and accurate techniques to refine visual elements and integrate them into the overall environment to awaken the creativity and imagination of the space.

Today, most immersive art events (such as TeamLab’s exhibitions) are realized completely in closed and dark spaces. The viewer is detached from the real world and loses the perception of physical space and environment. However, does the so-called “immersive” artistic experience have to be confined within a closed space? We want to challenge and explore a new kind of interactivity for this new typology in our design. Future Prism, designed by CATS, is an immersive art exhibition building, one of the first immersive art experience spaces in China that interacts with the surrounding urban environment. The combined innovation of design and imaging technology leads to a mixed experience blending the virtual and the real.

The 12th Cotton Mill in the southern section of Yangpu Riverfront is the first plot to be developed in the 5.5km shoreline, which completed its transformation from industrial to commercial use 20 years ago. Unfortunately, the earlier development strategy did not preserve any historical relics，leaving a wasteland. In the context of the connection of the Huangpu River waterfront public space, the design team focused on addressing the dual challenges updating the flood control system and the echoing historical memory.