Given various restrictions, a reasonable layout is proposed; a distinctive and high-quality architectural image.
The biggest challenge in the design is creating an iconic commercial building.
The project is a commercial complex building located in the old city area of Jinan, surrounded by urban vitality. The design goal is to achieve openness in the block and create a distinctive commercial building under various constraints.
The site boundary is a narrow triangular shape, with the surrounding roads lower in the north and higher in the south. By manipulating the elevation of the pedestrian plaza and commercial units, a double ground floor space is created, increasing the area for street-level businesses and improving the efficiency of ground floor shops, thus enhancing the commercial value of the site. The northern side of the building forms a submerged ground floor accessible through a sunken plaza and a ground floor accessed by a platform. In a city like Jinan, which has a high water table and is prone to heavy summer rainstorms, creating a sunken plaza poses many challenges. Through close collaboration with the landscape design team, measures such as landscape walls with seating areas and water interception facilities are implemented to ensure there is no risk of rainwater pouring into the area.
The site's volume ratio, building density requirements, and setbacks are strictly regulated. After accommodating setbacks, the single-floor area is less than 1600 square meters and presents difficulties in the layout due to its triangular shape. The building serves multiple functions, with ground-level shops, lower-level dining areas, middle-to-upper-level business hotels, and the top floor serving as self-owned offices. The combination of multiple functions presents challenges in circulation organization and fire evacuation. After extensive discussions, a dual-core layout is developed: the hotel and office spaces have separate entrances and circulation cores from the public circulation of the commercial areas. Circulation paths do not overlap, ensuring safe evacuation in the narrow space and also forming a structurally efficient layout. Furthermore, by optimizing and compacting the core areas, more surrounding space is left for commercial usage, resulting in a larger usable area.
The building facade undergoes multiple rounds of refinement, resulting in a modular facade unit. Except for the corner positions, there are only two types of module units for the north and east-west facades with different widths. Under cost constraints, this unit effectively addresses natural ventilation while not negatively affecting the large-scale curtain wall effect. The front face consists of fixed glass panels, while the sides have operable panels. The area of fixed glass panels is 4.5 and 5.7 square meters respectively. As none of the three facades face the main sunlight direction (south), the glass panels on the east-west facades are oriented as much as possible towards the south to maximize daylight for the interior spaces.
Considering various factors, aluminum panel curtain walls adopt a relatively bold color scheme. Taking inspiration from Vincent Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night," 17 different shades of blue-green-yellow colors are abstracted to form a patterned architectural facade. In contrast to the surrounding buildings primarily in low-saturation warm colors, this contrast and complementarity between the blue-green color palette and the conventional warm-colored buildings create a harmonious urban color scheme. It enlivens the urban space and effectively creates a distinctive and identifiable commercial architectural image. Some parts of the facade incorporate colored glass panels, with 7 different colors distributed on the three facades.