A Robot Space with a Human Touch
Does a robot café have to look technological?
Can Apple Store-style minimalism still represent the present?
Located on the lower floor of Sudo Technology’s office and robotics laboratory in a tower along Shanghai’s Yangpu waterfront, Bothaus is a small reception and exhibition space designed for the embodied intelligence company and its invited users.
At the outset of the project, the client introduced an unusual brief: the space should have a “low-tech feel”. We found the phrase intriguing. Rather than simply describing an aesthetic preference, it seemed to suggest a broader idea of the future — one in which technology becomes increasingly embedded in everyday life, and increasingly less conspicuous.
Two decades ago, spaces for displaying consumer technology were often conceived as sterile, immaterial environments. Technology was presented as something exceptional and almost out of reach. Its surroundings were expected to “point towards the future”, or to operate as a kind of abstract prophecy.
Today, embodied intelligence is becoming a tangible part of everyday life. Robots no longer need to appear mysterious or futuristic. They increasingly need to be understood as capable, reliable companions that can assist with everyday tasks and forms of production.
We therefore imagined the exhibition space less as a showroom and more as a kind of home — an environment in which technology is experienced as an ambient condition rather than displayed as a visual object. Instead of telling visitors that “the future is exciting”, the space attempts to make technology feel familiar and approachable.
Bothaus is, quite literally, a house for robots. The robots are its hosts: they make coffee, sell snacks and carry out routine maintenance. At first glance, it appears to be a comfortable and familiar space designed for people. Yet its layout, dimensions, materials and equipment have all been calibrated to accommodate the current requirements of robotic perception, movement and manipulation, as well as the testing, monitoring and recording carried out by technicians.
The program includes a coffee-making area, a presentation space, informal lounge and meeting areas, and meeting rooms of different sizes. Rather than dividing these functions into separate rooms, the interior is conceived as a continuous environment, with shifts in material defining different zones. This allows robots to move freely throughout the space while remaining easy to observe and monitor.
Materially, the project combines low-reflectance wall surfaces, relatively even flooring and a partially exposed ceiling. Rich colors, tactile finishes and subtle variations in texture introduce a material character that sits somewhere between smooth abstraction and natural roughness.
The relationship between technology and space is hardly a new question. As technologies evolve, our ideas of how the future should look — and our aesthetic expectations of it — continually shift with them.
Bothaus can perhaps be understood as a small snapshot of this particular moment in embodied intelligence: a space that records, at an intimate scale, how we currently imagine the relationship between humans and robots.
Team:
Architect: HCCH Studio
Design Team: Hao Chen, Chenchen Hu, Qisen Yang, Puchun Zhang, Yazhou Ding
Client: Sudo Technology
Photo: Qingyan Zhu
