Gold Interior Space and Exhibition Design · 2020
Sissis Wonderland Reading Space
by Leo Sun
- A' Design Award 2020 Gold Winner in Interior Space and Exhibition Design
- Awarded April 15, 2020
- CLIENT: Muxin Studio
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 16,936
- Verification code BFD206AB8A · Verify this award
About Sissis Wonderland Reading Space
Sissis Wonderland is a reading space for children, covering 108 square meters in Shanghai. The layout is inspired by the game of blowing bubbles, as rooms of different scales are joined together so that open and private areas overlap. Wood is the main material, combined with white paint and a soft grey floor finish. Stairs of varied heights, bookshelves that also serve as seats, zigzagging ramps and small arches are built to a child scale. Green plants grow where the spaces meet. The design turns the space itself into a large toy for exploration and play.
Leo Sun's Sissis Wonderland Reading Space emerges from contemporary explorations of child-centered educational architecture, participating in a design discourse that privileges sensory experience, imaginative engagement, and the phenomenology of inhabited space over purely functional considerations. The work demonstrates remarkable formal coherence through its commitment to curvilinear geometry, where every element—from the serpentine bookshelf that flows through the central zone to the repeated arched openings that punctuate the enclosing walls—participates in a unified vocabulary of soft, continuous forms. This architectural language may evoke associations with organic modernism's biomorphic investigations while simultaneously drawing upon the protective, enclosure-suggesting qualities of vernacular building traditions. The chromatic restraint, limiting the palette to warm wood tones against white surfaces with gray textile accents, creates an environment of visual calm that appears designed to support focused attention and contemplative reading. Particularly accomplished is the integration of natural and artificial illumination, with daylight entering through the elegantly proportioned arched window while concealed cove lighting traces ceiling profiles, together establishing an atmosphere of gentle luminosity. The layered spatial sequence, wherein arched apertures frame views into successive chambers, suggests a narrative architectural experience—each threshold offering discovery while maintaining visual connection to the whole. The design achieves that rare synthesis where furniture, architecture, and spatial experience merge into unified environmental design. One might consider how such spaces shape not only reading practices but the broader relationship between children and the built environments that shelter their imaginative development.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- After careful researches on various existing cases, designers found that the traditional way of children space design, with its flamboyant decoration, superficial embellishment and excessive use of meaningless figures, has lost its attractiveness. Hence they choose to make the project different by concentrate on the shape of the space itself, it's an attempt to turn the space itself into a giant toy, in which children can freely explore, discover and create their own lively experience.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The project covers a total of 108 square meters. Thinking from the perspective of a child, designers planned and divided the space in children's scales. Though spatially limited by the floor area, they managed to squeeze in stairs with different heights, bookshelves that also serves as chairs, zigzagging ramps and mini arches in children's size. All of these are in children's scale. Boys and girls can climb up and down or play hide-and-seek in these facilities without parents worrying about potential dangers and injuries.
- Tags
- Interior, Parent-child Reading Space, Modern, Simple, Art, Interesting, Bubbles, Muxin Studio, Nature
- Production Technology
- In order to elicit an amicable relationship between the space created and the surrounding plants, as well as to bring children closer to the nature, designers use wood as the main building material. The selection of white paint and the soft grey floor glue further guarantees the children a safe and interesting place to play, learn and interact. They grow green plants on the boundaries where different spaces meet, which helps sustaining the dynamic among person, space and nature.
- Design Challenge
- The main topic of the project is to give different configurations according to different realms in spaces. Since spaces with different functions communicate and fusion with each other, a multitude of spatial forms and hierarchies are created.
- Project Duration
- The project started in September 2018 in Shanghai and finished in November 2018 in Shanghai.
- Operation Flow
- According to many researches, children of three to seven years old are in their most sensitive period of growing from their subjective worlds to the objective world. A flowing space like this helps expanding their perceiving and communicating abilities and reveal the true and creative nature in a child.
- Research
- The varieties of spatial typology provide children with experiential guidance to explore boundaries between public and private spaces. During the process of moving through spaces with various qualities, the Introvert and extrovert tendencies of children are well reflected in their behaviors. In the experimental children reading space project, designers are aiming to create a cozy and amicable places for children to read and play, a place that inspires their imagination and creativity.
- Inspiration
- The configuration of spaces follows an idea inspired by the game of blowing bubbles: several spaces are arranged according to their scales and functions before recombined and attached like bubbles. Since spaces with different functions communicate and fusion with each other, a multitude of spatial forms and hierarchies are created, in which openness and independence, public and private, interior and exterior are overlapped and interconnected in a creative and pleasant way.
- Image Credits
- Image #1: Photographer Daqi Zhang, Bookshelves, 2018.
Image #2: Photographer Daqi Zhang, Mini Arches, 2018.
Image #3: Photographer Daqi Zhang, Reading Space, 2018.
Image #4: Photographer Daqi Zhang, Reading Space 2, 2018.
Image #5: Photographer Daqi Zhang, Corridor, 2018. - Patents
- Copyrights belong to Leo Sun, 2018.