Interviews with Chuan Wang
Designer profileDesign Interview
30 April 2020 · Lamborghini Exhibition Center Exhibition Center
The concept design of the Lamborghini exhibition center is inspired by Lamborghini’s classic vehicle type iteration; The building emphasizes a strong visual and spatial momentum created through the form, a strong, dynamic, twisting volume which is a result of use of 60 degrees angles which draw a strong relation to the surrounding site, creating a completely new type of architectural landmark.
Selection of the site is a departure from Lamborghini’s usual strategy, located in a city center location in a shop front which only offer limited options for how realization of the exhibition center space. So we made effort to settle this issue and figure it out, we want to make some differences in the limited and special space.
Our design represents the sensation of the site brought by Lamborghini’s handling performance. The architecture conforms to the site, creating continuous surface and integration of windows, establishing an interweaving between the building and surrounding site.The building expresses a unique DNA that is special to this site and culture of Lamborghini. This design embodies our consistent design principles and was approved by Lamborghini in the first meeting.
Out client is Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A, Zhengzhou Zhongyue Lamborghini Trading Co Ltd. And this Lamborghini exhibition center in Zhengzhou China is Lamborghini’s third independent designed exhibition center globally, after Milano and Dubai, which is unprecedented and has much value.
Lamborghini, one of the best known automobile manufacturers in the world for its super car, which works tirelessly pushing the envelope and evolving the company’s corporate culture, creating a series of dream sports vehicles. Lamborghini has over one hundred dealerships throughout the world, but only fee embodies a unique architectural design. So we decided to design this special and useful sales center for our client.
Out client is Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A, Zhengzhou Zhongyue Lamborghini Trading Co Ltd. And also this design about sale center of cars can help us gain more reputation.
Mainly the position selection of this design is different from others, which not only show our understanding of the Lamborghini’s corporate culture, but also present our advanced design principles and tools.
It’s very simple and easy to understand, just the main function plus the brand’s name. And it’s also consistent with our design thoughts, determined proportions and clear contours.
The design starts with drawing inspiration from Lamborghini supercars’ powerful lines and dynamic angles. This logic is super imposed over the site, making use of parallelograms and triangles as a base language and expanding from there responding to the site. The entire building is surrounded by a continuously revolving facade. From inside, visitors can engage in a type of spatial dialogue with the exterior environment through the windows unique design and spatial characteristics of the windows. Walking inside the building has the same allure or driving a special “super car”, while maintaining a spatial relationship between indoors and outdoors views.
PMA (PolyMorphArchitects) is the design team and I’m the partner in charge. We have architecture and interior design team in addition to landscape design Team.
Since this is a car sales center, we fully consider about different needs and rationally arrange the space. We researched similar sales and exhibition center and also tap the difference of ours. In the end, the building includes four main functional spaces: new car exhibition area, services and maintenance area, VIP Lounge and management office.And the first and second floor are connected reasonably and conveniently and create more potential space.
Like an inverted triangle, the site for the new building is located near the airport highway at South Third Ring Road in the Zhengzhou New Zone adjacent to a 24-meter high existing building to the north with green park space located to the south, covering an area of less than 1000 m2. The biggest challenge of this project is how to mediate between these two conditions within limited space, combining the features of the site to create a building that can reflect Lamborghini’s corporate spirit and creating a truly exceptional design that is convincing to Lamborghini’s headquarter in Milan.
First, as the world’s most prestigious and influential design accolade, A’ Design Award and Competition represents authority and professional recognition. And our collaborative company PLASMA studio in addition to some superior companies in China have applied it before, we are aware of its benefit and also want to spread the influence of our project, so we made great effort to prepare.
The most important part is to fully understand the brand and company. Only by correctly putting ideas and thoughts into practice can the design have profound functions and meaning. Determined proportions, clear contours, precise lines and pure surfaces are DNA characteristics of design reduced to its very essence, which give us more inspiration.
PMA is a cross-boundary office focused on glocal design, with a range of design disciplines spanning multiple scales. This practice works are combined with the world's cutting-edge academic research, reflecting the exploration of today's social and economic development and urban environment. And our further goal is to apply the advanced digital technology to the whole design process in combination with the exploration of landscape urbanism.
Design Legend Interview
3 May 2020
I have industrial, architectural and landscape design, three background.
Being a designer is just a natural interest for me. I actually wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid, and I always thought I'd be a scientist or an engineer. My father teaches mathematics and used to work in the Beijing institute of atomic energy, he did something similar to the applied mathematics which motivated me to be a scientist. But as I mentioned, my own interest is the best motivation and I am eager to create something beneficial to people or the environment.
We don't really differentiate between one type and another, and we like designs that are challenging. The more extreme the design conditions, the more excited we get.
A good designer can make a thing without mistakes and even efficiently, but a great designer can make a design benefit the entire society and human beings. It has the value to guide the whole trend in addition to just solving problems. Although we use the idea of solving problems, we must have our own values.
I will check does it have any social goals and at the same time, time is also a relatively important measure. After many years of design, does it still inspiring? A good design may have more costs in the beginning, but it can have longer-term benefits in the long run.I think design is about reconsidering the relationship between people and the environment or surroundings. It can make people's life more efficient and more comfortable, and more harmonious with their surroundings.
I think design is about reconsidering the relationship between people and the environment or surroundings. It can make people's life more efficient and more comfortable, and more harmonious with their surroundings.
I really want to do something for children in village, whose life conditions is poor and inconvenient.
It might be some urban design for a particularly poor place as I mentioned. Nowadays, urban design basically is in some most developed cities. There is no such opportunity because poor places have little implementation power, and it will not ask you to do it. This kind of project is rare, and many of it is just some social activities, or something more like a regional design, which have strong development attributes.
Thinking from different professions while maintaining your own values.
Peter Eisenman
I think design is about reconsidering the relationship between people and the environment or surroundings. Design can make people's life more efficient and more comfortable, and more harmonious with their surroundings. Industrial designers sort out the relationship between people and objects, landscape architectural designers establish the relationship between people and the environment, and the urban design project sorts out the relationship between people and society.
It must be my co-partners. Among our four partners, we are in a mutually supportive relationship. In a long enough practice, since our partners have different backgrounds and nationalities, we can learn from each other.
We are working on the civil cede ring, which is the first civil law theme park in China, and also the first time we have tried to do this kind of conceptual theme design. We used modern and international design techniques, and we added regional elements in it. We didn't rely on the local or use too much local materials and forms. This project is comprehensive enough, it is a park plan and also includes landscape design and architecture, we also try to integrate this cultural attribute into the landscape. We will certainly try more different types of design in the future.
The most important thing is to help them understand their relationship with the environment.
The design was originally designed to better solve the relationship between human individuals and environment, ecology, and society, which can cause people to think more about their position in the entire environment.
The development of technology will definitely bring about great changes in the design industry. Technology will replace many functional designs, but the design of this kind of values and this relationship must still be done by people ourselves.
The boundaries of design are bound to blur. We go from product design to urban planning, and many times we use the same values and ideas. And then the future of the design. I think it's the same thing, you don't really differentiate between what kind of design, and in the future it may be a cross-cutting category, and even design can lead to engineering and construction.
It depends. If you do it fast, you only need an hour. On the downside, it can take weeks to find the starting point that you think is right for you. If the design resonates very strongly, you may have thought through all the major elements of the design in a very short time.
In general, I think it is the design driven by the trend. First of all, it is the development of the entire society drive the development of design. Next, good design will let us rethink this relationship.
What is your profound and long-term thoughts behind our design.
Of course, we have always been a partnership and have 4 partners.
I think you if have done a good job, naturally someone will pay attention to you. Famous is an additional result.
When we are designing, many times we are going to become people who help them solve technical barriers, but technical barriers do not refer to that specific technical method. When we are doing projects that we are good at, since he interacts in various fields, we need to promote mutual understanding. Just like we have our own landscape construction team, architectural construction team, and indoor construction team below, but our design needs to consider these aspects at the same time, and finally it becomes an overall plan. This is kind of special for me.
Designer Interview
3 May 2020
I have industrial, architectural, landscape design three background. And being a designer is just a natural interest for me. I actually wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid, and I always thought I'd be a scientist or an engineer. My father teaches mathematics and used to work in the Beijing institute of atomic energy, he did something similar to the applied mathematics which motivated me to be a scientist.
PMA is a cross-boundary office focused on glocal design, with a range of design disciplines from furniture design and installation art to architectural landscape and urban planning. The practice works of the firm are combined with the world's cutting-edge academic research, reflecting the exploration of today's social and economic development and urban environment and has always been committed to actively participating in the creation of urban space.
I think design is about reconsidering the relationship between people and the environment or surroundings. Design can make people's life more efficient and more comfortable, and more harmonious with their surroundings.
We don't really differentiate between one type and another, and we like designs that are challenging. The more extreme the design conditions, the more excited we get.
My favorite project among our company might be this is Lamborghini sales center project, and for the landscape project is sunken garden. The volume of these two projects is small enough and the design is free, we can try to put the thinking of the relationship between people and environment into it. Because Lamborghini is a building of 1000 square meters, which gives relatively large freedom, we can focus on solving some key problems by means of design. Sunken garden is our personal attempt, the first attempt to put the feeling of Chinese garden into the landscape design. We simulated the spatial feeling of a different landscape in suzhou, China, while using very modern materials, such as fair-faced concrete.
As a product designer, my first project is a computer. As a space designer, my first project is to make a plot similar to the exhibition area for a well-known designer brand.
Concrete and metal are definitely my favorites. For technology, parameterization technique.
To consider the requirements of the design itself and the meaning behind it, at the same time, we think it needs to have a logical intersection, you come up with a logic, the logic can be successfully solved in the end. On the contrary, in the use and practice, some users will feel it is a suitable thing is valuable enough, after all, everyone's appeal is not the same.
The design can uesd to promote the whole environment, let the society be more harmonious, this need to be a basic responsibility.
The boundaries of design are bound to blur. We go from product design to urban planning, and many times we use the same values and ideas. And then the future of the design. I think it's the same thing, you don't really differentiate between what kind of design, and in the future it may be a cross-cutting category, and even design can lead to engineering and construction.
Most of my inspiration comes from the intersection of knowledge in different fields. I find their commonness and individuality among different fields, and then sort them out by a unified set of thinking or a set of logic of values. There are many sources likes books, movies and music.
We don't really talk about a particular design style. We emphasize the blurry boundaries between the building and the landscape, but it's more of a feature. Our name of the company know as PolyMorph, means we don't want to be a company with a specific design style and have a fixed style in the form.
Beijing. This will certainly happen. Everyone's own cultural background and heritage will have a certain impact. We do have a long tradition, but everything has two sides, and it's not really affected that much by environment. Now that information is so developed, there's really no region and is pretty glacal. Just like you put traditional Chinese understanding into the relationship between natural landscape and people, it not only brings you a good design, but some information and elements, and then it depends on how you use that information.
It is important to have a more open environment for discussion. Management can be hierarchical enough, but design needs to be flat. For companies and designers, I think it's a two-way process, not the company chooses the designers, but how you can improve yourself to attract better ones to come.
When we do large-scale projects, it’s very typical, just like when we were in school. For example, for some urban design projects, we first have index, then prototype, then massing, and then network urban design. These are four typical steps for us. In architectural design, we will similarly translate it into a set of methods of architectural design, which is simply to analyze the site, solve problems, and form a logical way of thinking, as well as an understanding of sociology and morphology.
Advantages, the sensitivity of the designer to life will be very high. You'll really experience a lot of relationships with the environment and society. Disadvantages, just this feeling can't stop, the job of stylist does not have a boundary line, if you like, he is a good thing, let your life have more connotation, at the same time bad aspect, he is a companion state. I have talked with my friends who are in finance, and I can feel that our life state is totally different. When they come to the market close, they go off work, and then they don't have to think too much about data or work. However, it is difficult for us to achieve this state when we do design.
To do meaningful design, for any object it has to be meaningful, for the individual, for the environment, for the society, this is the core. After a certain time, it still has the meaning and value of existence, to bring us thinking and inspiration.
There's not a time management problem for us, if you just talk about doing the design thing, as I said, it's an adjoint process, all the time you're doing the design. For the company time management, it might be those transactional jobs. In addition, design is not a pure pile of time, it is sure to take a lot of time, but it does not mean that more time is better.
This is completely different. If you do it fast, you only need an hour. On the downside, it can take weeks to find the starting point that you think is right for you. If the design resonates very strongly, you may have thought through all the major elements of the design in a very short time.
We will certainly try more different types of design.
We are working on the civil cede ring, which is the first civil law theme park in China, and also the first time we have tried to do this kind of conceptual theme design. We used modern and international design techniques, and we added regional elements in it. We didn't rely on the local or use too much local materials and forms. This project is comprehensive enough, it is a park and also includes landscape design and architecture, we also try to integrate this cultural attribute into the landscape.