Guangzhou Design Week Exhibition Hall by Jisushe: 2018 Best of Year Winner for Trade Show Booth
Deadlines can be crushing. Or in this case, inspiring. C&C Design Co. founder and design director Peng Zheng assembled leaders from seven local design firms under the banner Jisushe to work individually and communally, from sketch to install, on the Guangzhou Design Week Exhibition Hall, a meet-and-greet pavilion in the nearly 1 million-square-foot Poly World Trade Center Expo. The catch? The collective was convened just 60 days before load-in. But the timing wasn’t a pesky case of procrastination, rather a premeditated ploy to instill urgency and jump-start creativity.
Initially focused on the image of a granary, their concept ultimately broadened to simulate an entire city rising in the shadows of the warehouse, itself signified by a luminous vaulted surround, essentially a supersize light box, consisting of nearly 10,000 panels. Under the roof and bordering the perimeter are imaginary streets punctuated by “patios,” the surrounding partitions constructed from approximately 73,000 recyclable paper bricks. The team then planted 140,000 golden chaffs of wheat across the 8,600-square-foot footprint, each patio sprouting its own plot. The continuity of the materials, contrasted against the compartmentalized layout, came to symbolize not only the group’s separate-but-equal design process but also the dynamics of relationships in general. “The division of space retains independence but also ensures interconnection,” Peng says. “It’s exchange and symbiosis.”
Project Team: Golden Ho; Ming Leung; Tony Ho; Alan Chan; Alice Deng; Horace Ray Wong; Zen Zheng.
> See more Best of Year Project Winners from the December 2018 issue of Interior Design
