Shangri-La Shougang Park: industrial setting up turned fantastical resort
Lissoni & Associates has designed Shangri-La Shougang Park, a new hotel in Beijing that reimagines industrial architecture for the hospitality earth
Situated some 20km from the historical web-site of the Forbidden City, Shangri-La Shougang Park was inaugurated just as the the latest 2022 Winter season Olympics in Beijing kicked off. Impressively made by Milan-based architecture studio Lissoni & Partners and in distinct the firm’s Lissoni Casal Ribeiro section that focuses on masterplans, architecture and landscape style and design, the new lodge provides a refreshing choose on Beijing architecture, constructed in just the remnants of an deserted 20th-century industrial building, using benefit of the reimagined city landscapes and industrial ruins developed by China’s financial reforms of the 1990s.
Bridging eras, the 5-star resort is composed of a blend of the site’s current industrial architecture factors and new additions that, the architects clarify, sort ‘a sequence of interconnected structures’. These are broadly divided into two parts: the Major Setting up, which will take on the more social and communal roles of the hotel, and the Guestroom Setting up, which houses its 282 rooms.
The Principal Building is enveloped in an elaborate glass façade that functions as a ‘transparent skin’. It wraps about the unique industrial components, this kind of as concrete walls and steel roof trusses, which are remaining uncovered in all their utilitarian glory. This juxtaposition of previous and new resources is highlighted by a major green aspect, ‘almost as if nature is looking for to get possession of these as soon as-abandoned buildings,’ the team notes. The plants both illuminate and help regulate the inner local weather with their presence.
Lissoni & Partners worked with the existing industrial scale and organized the structure throughout two flooring in the Primary Constructing, having benefit of its striking inner top of 20m. As a outcome, the floor stage consists of a substantial sheltered sq., loaded with bars and places to eat that spill into the outside the house and encourage website visitors in. On the other hand, a 2nd flooring characteristics the hotel reception and an extended lounge place crafted in just a bespoke picket composition described by the architects as an personal ‘nest’. In contrast, a wellness place, which features a pool and a gymnasium, is wrapped in glazing and nestled independently within just the industrial construction.
A new-build extension to the Main Making creates a committed, multipurpose event space. Below, intricately crafted black ceramic bricks clad the façade, producing this section of the complex stand out from the close by glass exterior wall and the smaller sized volumes of the Guestroom Making.
Right here as well, industrial elements, these as the huge ventilation pipes, are uncovered in the course of as part of the architects’ conceptual referencing of the building’s background and context.
An elevated bridge connects the Principal and Guestroom hubs. Juxtaposing the industrial imagery of the Major Building, the architects created a softer environment in the bed room areas, both of those via the all round scale (the volumes are much more compact and characteristic more compact, vertical openings), and by means of subtler visible references to the site’s former existence.
The façade is created of brickwork and sustainable resources for best thermal and ventilation functionality. Muted tones and ornaments referencing regional custom adorn the rooms.
Lissoni & Partners explains its overall strategy: ‘To give equilibrium and proportion to the framework, the façade is visually divided into a few various horizontal levels: the floor flooring with terraces and cantilevering canopies that detach the setting up from the floor offering it an air of lightness a second and a lot more compact layer and last but not least a big canopy that floats higher than the roof, sheltering it from direct sunlight and concealing the MEP [mechanical, electrical and plumbing] locations.’
Traditional craftmanship and area society are ever-present at Shangri-La Shougang Park, through bespoke furnishings and modern day Chinese art. Installations drawing on the site’s industrial past are displayed throughout the constructing, carefully selected by Lissoni & Partners and Hong Kong art consultants Debut Studio.
On the entire, Shangri-La Shougang Park brings collectively seamlessly the aged and the new, carefully layered and extensively reimagined. The story of the building conjures the fantastical with its weaving of eras, resources, proportions and functions, which all occur alongside one another to generate a vessel of the potential.
Lissoni & Partners builds on thorough design gestures that work with a historical architectural spoil, nodding, perhaps, to the way the great, late Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill composed his famed Cement Manufacturing unit – an architecture that is not about concealment, but relatively a celebration of a repurposed industrial making. §
