Shuwai in Pudong

The site is located on the 7th and 8th floor of a 20-floor building in Pudong. There is a high ceiling balcony connecting both floor’s structure. For an apartment, it is rare to see this pattern. It is like a mini villa inside of an apartment complex. To find the solution/method for this kind of duplex structure, I believe we need to return to the characteristics of the building itself and moderately enlarge its advantage, and by doing so be able to find a suitable definition for the space. Although it is a far easier way of the solution/method and it does not have too much ingenious artifice, but the practical feasibility is very high. We decided to explore from here to crack the logical structure of the entire space.

At the entrance located on the lower floor, we place the staircase at the bottom side as the swivel hinge of the entire spacing. On one hand is use as a view of the entrance, on the other hand it also does the job as a segmentation to divide and define the entire spacing into left and right, up and down. Utilize the staircase as the horizontal and vertical space occlusion interface. More over utilize the mirror on the ceiling to enlarge the left and right vertical modeling hidden cabinet, the purpose is to connect and enlarge the vision focus point of the colored glaze droplight to the upper floor and the lower floor, to make it more pop out and more glitter.

On the left hand side of the staircase is the living-room. The balcony of the living room has a high ceiling directly connect to the master bedroom. On the bottom side of the balcony place a two floor high mirror to magnify the entire space. The right hand side of the staircase is the dining-room. It connects to the western kitchen and the Chinese kitchen. The ceiling has saw-off an approximately sixty centimeter hollow to set off partial vision link to the study room. Follow the vertical vector staircase to the private area on the 2nd floor. Beside of the master bedroom and secondary bedroom, all the public space utilize the mobile separator as an agile way to linking the space together.

BY MoHen Design International