Wandering, Exploring, Getting lost At the invitation of Shanghai Fashion Week, F.O.G. Architecture designed and constructed the HCH Showroom for this year's Shanghai Fashion Week. The space was designed to help designer brands from around the world present themselves in a more diverse and multisensory way, at the same time creating a unique and vivid opportunity to view and experience the fashion week.
Considering fashion itself and the pristine nature of the site, we designed a towering "soft forest" by using fabrics like felt. The softness of the fabric breaksup the regularity of columns, bringing over a spatial sense that is both ambiguous and dreamy. Plan Arrangements and Design Developments A “wall of fabric” drapes from the high ceiling and extends across the floor.The draping of the fabrics forms natural flowing lines and planes resembling waterfalls; complements and interacts with the garments displayed within.
Soft forest
These fabric partitions run through the space in a seemingly irregular manner, constructing a labyrinth-like space as if it was an immersive art installation, which invites the viewers walking into it to experience a sense of pleasure in perception and exploration. Rudolf Arnheim, an art theorist of Gestalt psychology, addresses the interaction of art and architecture on concentric and grid spatial patterns. He argues that form and content are indivisible, and that the patterns created by artists reveal the nature of human experience. Sensory knowledge allows for the possibility of language, since the only access to reality we have is through our senses.
Visual perception is what allows us to have a true understanding of experience. Unlike conventional ways of constructing a showroom, we used trusses to build a framework, ensuring sufficient stability while giving full play to the characteristics of the materials. The fabric is fixed to the ground at both ends and the trusses “pull up” the fabric from the middle, allowing the fabric to drape naturally creating spaces. The trusses lift up the soft fabrics, a flexible “labyrinth” emerges within. The layout of the fabrics is irregular although purposeful, with some forming open spaces and others forming semi-obscured “shelters”.
The interplay between the opening and closing is effectively encrypted in the visual and physical activities of the viewers, and is ultimately expressed in a holistic visual form. Sustainability The materials used to build the space are majorly fabric. The designer chooses to use the raw material for fashion to form the space for the reason of reducing the discarding of the materials.
The client worked with the designer to choose the fabric used for their garment to be used in this design. After the finishing of the fashion week, all the fabric will be transferred back to the client and will be made into clothing. So then there will be no waste material produced after the event. Also, the fixing piece for the fabric is the paper core. It is used as the core for fabric roll while transferring. Usually, there were discarded while the fabric arrives at its destination.
In this case, the paper core is recycled to be used in the show. For these two decisions, the design itself is trying to express the idea of low carbon production and sustainability. Flexible labyrinth This ambiguous spatial experience resembles the intimate and romantic relationship between the human body and the garments; people are wrapped up in the space as if bodies wrapped in clothes. Visually, the overall greenish, warm colour palette brings a sense of peace and comfort, and the balanced colour distribution achieves a harmonious aesthetic. We seek to create visuals that better set the overall tone and ambience of the space, assisting customers with a better understanding of the sensation each brand tends to convey. The space becomes a bridge and a medium that connects between people and garments.
Different from traditional cubicle layouts, this roaming, immersive spatial experience increases the likelihood of customers entering the showroom, and extends the time they spend on shopping and wandering. How to attract customers to linger, stay, and consume is a key concern when designing a showroom. Providing customers with an exploratory experience gives emphasis to the pleasure of offline shopping and the irreplaceable nature of physical engagement, just as the inseparable bond between space and people, clothes and the body. Space with an exploratory experience In consideration of the circulation, we turned away from a straightforward linear flow, allowing customers to backtrack and even get ‘lost’ in space.
The diversity, volatility and rapid iteration of fashion, as well as the lightness and collage of the fabrics, particularly the textures of felt and recycled fabrics, serve as all sources of inspiration for the design of the space. The bespoke furnitures by F.O.G. creates another layer of roughness to the space The softness of the fabric and the rigidity of the building form a strong contrast as well as a beautiful collision, integrating with the garments on display in the showroom as an organic whole entity, shaping the atmosphere of the space while guiding the audience to perceive the energy of the garments per se.