Physical and digital realities merge at DoBe WE in Shanghai Book City, an office park building designed by Wutopia Lab.
Dubbed Iron Rain by the locally based firm’s founder and chief architect Yu Ting, the building’s design draws inspiration from the movie The Matrix, utilizing 500 white aluminum plates for the façade to simulate a heavy downpour reminiscent of the film’s visuals of ever-changing green digits, symbolizing the inevitability of digitalization.
“We stacked the different sizes of perforated aluminum panels into three layers, creating a façade that resembles a metal rain curtain, which is my favorite part of design,” Ting reflects.
The exterior’s cascading plates are made with perforations in Morse code, forming a mysterious hidden message. The rain theme gracefully transitions from outside to interior, which reveals a large-windowed lobby and steel bookshelves shaped like raindrops.
“We intended to design the lobby as a library, so we crafted the bookshelves to resemble rain curtains,” explains Ting. “Stepping into the space feels like the rain curtains are being drawn open.”
The outdoor public space features a pocket garden with a grid-like layout. Black titanium mirrored stainless steel panels create a parallel universe, reflecting passersby while hiding various individual parks that are nestled inside the garden.
At the center of the park stands a red obelisk inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, which displays waterfall-like digital rain graphics, linking the physical and digital realms.
Ting comments on how “office parks worldwide are quite similar as they have become urbanized. Two-thirds of the tenants in this building are ultimately creatives—I believe their creativity will be greatly stimulated by this distinctive environment.”
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