Since its establishment, the A8 Design Center has been committed to holding diversified and interesting crossover activities, and providing a novel, interesting and futuristic space for more young designers to use. Thus A8 bubble house came into existence. It is a dynamic experimental space, which serves also as a large-scale art installation displayed in the Luxelakes Art Expo Center for following several months, blowing away the hazes of cold winter by the Luxelakes. Luxelakes is famous for its water, and A8 POP is built by the waterside. It has five bubble spaces of different sizes, connecting the undulating steps, tree pools, plants and water platforms as one through tortuous corridors. The colorful scales of the outer appearance shine in the lake, and the golden light sets off bubbles in the red wall. The bubbles are created to awaken everyone's childlike innocence, to pick up our imagination and curiosity of our childhood about the outside world, and to explore the unknown with our gifted creativity.
The passageway by the lake on site is the main pedestrian road in the inner courtyard, and also the only truck road for transporting materials in various exhibition halls like the A4 Art Museum and Luxelakes Art Expo Center. Therefore, after trying the possibility of allowing pedestrians and trucks pass through the exhibition shed which crosses the road and making the exhibition shed more hydrophilic, the architect made a quick decision of retracting the volume and perching on the scattered outdoor steps and platforms. It revolves around and wanders among different height differences, vegetation and water system, and deeply occluded the site. Like flowing bubbles, it softly and closely accompanies with the groundbreaking Luxelakes Art Expo Center by landscape architecture master Antoine Predock, and matches the MOTION philosophy in his design language.
Considering that the exhibition shed can't destroy the stone on the ground of the site, the architect used square steel to make the ground steel beams and protected it with rubber substrate. The occasionally-rising ground steel beams are in accordance with the undulation of the original flower bed on the site and forms the entrance and exit of the exhibition shed. 66 horizontal main steel beams rise from the ground steel beams, like winding joints, well-spaced and connected with staggered secondary longitudinal steel beams one by one. In the later process of on-site production, the architect intentionally adjusted some main horizontal steel beams, and created some mutations, so that the surface was not consistently round and full, which becomes more natural and real, organic and ecological.
Regarding the skin, the architect did a lot of research on materials and wrapping methods. For a temporary exhibition space of relatively limited cost, ETFE film is obviously unreasonable, so the architect found the cost-effective agricultural greenhouse film. However, it turned out that the hyperboloid can never be flattened, because there will be a lot of cracks and missing areas on the unfolded surface. Then after many attempts, the architect decided to adopt the simplest and most effective method - scale. After parameterizing 12 kinds of scale sizes, while taking effect and the difficulty of on-site construction into consideration, the architect finally selected three materials and two sizes: the light-transmitting woven film and light-transmitting greenhouse film mainly, which are used in a certain proportion and hung based on four principles. Lastly, the transparent and dazzling color film were used to decorate the whole scale to enhance the pixel sense of the scale mapping environment and the flowing sense of color.
As for the whole volume, the architect set up 10 skylights protruding outwards, only wrapped in the plastic film with better transmission of light. These skylights are outlined by the light belt along with the ground steel beams, together with the surrounding ground lamps and the oval light belt hanging inside the space. In this way, the lakeside of Luxelakes Art Expo Center welcomes a new bright bubble-like site – the A8 Pop – It’s providing a special place for more and more interesting and thoughtful young people in the future to light up the lakeside together.
