Chengdu MINI Showroom Complex

ARCHIHOPE makes full use of the unified design of architecture, landscape and interior to create a site with a double function - Mini commercial complex, which serves as both an IP showroom for MINI cars and a mini social complex for the public with galleries, makers, coffee, new retail for IP merch, etc. Although all the design work must follow a core concept, we didn't want to design a conventional slab-type apartment building just like those in traditional industrial and living areas around us.
The two-floor building is divided into two cuboid volumes, one of which on the second floor is rotated counterclockwise. The upper building volume is separated from the original structural frame, with the intention of turning it towards the main entrance of the whole site to present an open and friendly gesture and to reshape the richness and expressiveness of the building.
The facade made of expanded aluminum sheets obscures the building's glass curtain wall on the premise of natural lighting, and forms the superimposed effect of double facade and a virtual and real change at the same time.
Expanded aluminum sheets and steel structural components are made of environmentally friendly materials such as aluminum and other metals. The materials are reusable, safe and secure, and will not change color or rust, which will save a lot of cost at the same time.
While the overall design strives to be simple, it abandons the stacking of materials, takes sustainability as the design principle, using the original building structural beams and extending expanded aluminum sheets through indoor space of the first floor. It saves a lot of cost to retain the original mottled reinforced concrete columns. The bare reinforced concrete columns, which seem to tell a story of watching vicissitudes of history lonely, have a sense of historic dignified beauty, and its direct reuse is of safety, economy, ecology and aesthetic values.