Marco Polo Gate

The architects started thinking about this project from the words they heard at the official competition meetings they attended in Shanghai: “The new project will be inside Yangpu District, the new Project will be inside Tongji University, the new project will have an innovative design”.

The architects about this phrase and realized that the building should care very much the urban context and should have different approaches to it because the location and the functions will be in the middle between Yangpu district and Tongji Campus, between the city and the university.

From this phrase they also learned that this building should not have ordinary image, but it should have a strong representative and symbolic architecture to represent innovation industrial design in this District, which is the real capital of design in China.

They also considered as a basic principle for their design that the final target for the investment is to rent the offices and commercial spaces on the market. This meant that they had to avoid extreme design to try designing appealing spaces but with reasonable building costs, and minimize maintenance and operational costs. This affected the design solutions especially concerning the operational layout of the buildings, independence of the accesses, and the main materials and finishes.

Context Analysis – One Building Three Different Urban App roaches
The site has three different relations with the urban surroundings due to three different urban scale of the context:

1) The first feature of the context is the Siping road. This side is facing west is the most important street bordering the site in terms of urban ranking. Siping road is the connection with the main City road network and is the most representative and symbolic stage for the new complex. This side is the official face of the building to the district and the entire Shaghai city. They called this approach: THE SIMBOLIC CREATIVE VALUE.

2) The second feature is the relation with the residential texture on the south and on the east side of the site. On the south the site faces the north elevation of high residential towers. This means that on this side they needed to have a wide road and anyway the new buildings will not keep away the sun from the residences. The east side facing Fuxin road is very important to establish a correct and proportioned relation with the existing buildings because the width of the road cannot be changed and some existing building will be very close to the new complex. They have called this approach: THE HUMAN SCALE VALUE.

3) The third feature of the context is the connection with the inner life of the campus through the pedestrian tunnel that passing below Siping road and that connects the Tongji campus with the site. They have called this approach: THE INTIMATE SPIRIT SPACE.

Then designers started thinking about a building that could have a single identity but three different ways to relate with the urban context: The symbolic value toward Siping road, The Human scale Value facing the Fuxin road, and the intimate space facing the connection with Tongji Campus.

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Materials provided by AM Project (Architetti Milanesi)