The Styled Gate is a creative outdoor intervention designed as a campaign to enhance the Chinese New Year of the Rooster’s experience at Xintiandi Style, a thriving, renowned award-winning commercial area of Shanghai.
For this campaign, 100 Architects was commissioned to design an eye-catching 2D graphic to be printed onto perforated stickers to cover the entire curtain wall façade of all entrances to Xintiandi Style in order to call the attention of pedestrians during Chinese New Year.
To celebrate the Year of the Rooster, the intervention had to highlight the Rooster’s character according to Chinese Zodiac beliefs and tradition, therefore colorful and eye-catching, almost showing off.
However, the idea of just a graphic design without a direct impactful effect on people around was not appealing enough for us. The exercise would have been reduced to design an advertising billboard.
Instead, we came up with the idea of intervening not only the façade, but also the space in front of it, creating an L-shape holistic intervention of floor-façade as one entity, turning a Graphic Design commission into a Spatial Painted Scape intervention.
To achieve that, we followed two strategies: The first one was to conceive both parts, the ground’s horizontal plane and the façade’s vertical plane, as one continuous “two-dimensional canvas” where the rendered graphic would transform the given surface. The second strategy was to drag the 2D graphic out of the façade, turning it into three-dimensional objects that would provide instant functions as benches for people to gather, sit and rest.
By doing that, we turned a circulation space into space to stay, into a meeting point to meet friends before getting into the commercial space, a space to sit and have a rest from shopping. We turned a regular mall entrance into a vivid & colorful splash of Chinese patterns and intriguing symbology resembling the Chinese culture and the Year of the Rooster itself.
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