YIMIN OFFICE CAMPUS STREET FACADE & LANDSCAPE
Architect: JSA Architects
Location: 376 Zhaojiabang Road, Shanghai, China
Architectural Area: 42,652 sqm
Site Area: 14,292 sqm
Project Year: Completed 2019
The Yimin Office Campus combines landscape. architecture, and interior design to bring together the client’s previously chaotic assemblage of building functions. JSA helped bring focus to the project, concentrating on a renewed tower office lobby, partial facade improvements, a reconstructed courtyard office and company cafeteria, and an upgraded site landscape linking everything together.
Design Process
The creation of the Yimin’s Office Campus centered on finding a cohesive strategy for tying together the client’s wildly different buildings, which varied dramatically in scale, style and function. The company’s high-rise tower fronted Zhaojiabang Road; its main lobby was accessed from a semi-public alley along the side. Hemmed in closely by neighboring structures, that alley continued back to a 3-story courtyard building behind, where Yimin’s cafeteria was housed.
To make sense of this all, we decided to focus solely on the site landscape and the first 2-3 stories of facade. Inspired by the plantane-lined streets of the nearby French Concession, we found that we could create a cohesive, comfortable streetscape at the tree canopy height and below.
Original Site Condition
The original site was a visual clutter: large advertisements, a mix of interior and exterior styles, left-over architectural elements no longer being used, and miscellaneous small-scale “improvements” built up over time that had begun to take over the original building.
At the same time, there were many opportunities to be taken advantage of: an auxiliary building with an intimate landscaped courtyard, a human-scaled alley linking it to the main tower, and a ground floor tenant whose lease was up, allowing us to reconfigure the street-level functions.