Sparch is looking forward to the inauguration of Raffles City Beijing, Sparch’s first major built project in the capital. The iconic mixed-use development at Dongzhimen opened its doors to the public in early June.
Raffles City is CapitaLand’s premier brand of mixed-use development. Like a hyper-condensed version of a city, it provides an interconnected point for living, working, eating, shopping, sports and entertainment. Raffles City Beijing follows the existing Raffles Cities in Singapore and Shanghai, and is the first in a new breed of Raffles Cities with projects by Raphael Vinoly in Bahrain, Stephen Holl in Chengdu, UN Studio in Hangzhou and Sparch in Ningbo.
Designed by Stephen Pimbley, Sparch’s founder and director, and Jan Clostermann, Sparch’s Beijing studio director, Sparch’s proposal for Raffles City Beijing has a positive impact on Beijing as well as the future of the Raffles City brand.
Raffles City Beijing is a truly urban project and Sparch concentrated on creating new public spaces in a dense mix of programmatic elements and integrating these into the city.
The development sits on a 150,000 sqm site located at the junction of the East 2nd Ring Road and Dongzhimen Neidajie, the 24-hour restaurant street known to locals as “Ghost Street”. Diagonally opposite its northeast corner and connected by an underground link is the Dongzhimen Transport Interchange, Asia’s largest transport hub.
The brief called for the four programmatic elements – office, retail, residential and serviced apartment - to be both interconnected and yet independent; interconnected so that all components can complement each other and independent so that elements could be operated or sold off separately. The high plot ratio challenged the architects to fulfil the client’s call for a distinguishable entrance and legible identity for each component. The situation was further complicated as the city confined vehicular access to the various drop-offs and five levels of basements to the west and south sides of the site.
Four distinct volumetric elements occupy the site - a 90 m-tall, 21-storey office tower at the northeast corner, a five-storey retail podium, and above this podium, a 17-storey serviced apartment slab tower in the east and a 15-storey residential slab tower in the west that rises to 75 m in height.
Sparch opted to architecturally separate the towers from the podium. This serves to fragment the mass of the total building volume into appropriately oriented components.
Significant emphasis had been given to the design of the northeast corner of the development. The office tower and podium turn 45 degrees towards the transport interchange diagonally opposite the urban plaza in front of the main retail entrance.
This dynamic visual connection extends as a vertical slot in between the retail podium and the lower levels of the office building. This canyon-like space provides an urban corridor opening up the city block to its hinterland of low-rise residential buildings. The centre of this slot is occupied by a small crystalline enclosure serving as the lobby to the office tower and a sheltered link between retail and office.
The residential and serviced apartment towers on the podium are staggered in plan and rotated slightly to achieve required sun lighting angles and the maximum possible separation from the adjacent office tower.
The two residential slab towers are connected on the podium roof by the tessellated skin of the clubhouse. The clubhouse accommodates the serviced apartment lobby, a swimming pool, gym, and restaurant.
LANDSCAPE
The experience of entering and moving around Raffles City is fundamental to the architectural idea of making the visitor’s journey surprising, memorable and enjoyable.
Consequently, Sparch aspired to provide an enticing public square and promote open circulation through the landscaped strip along the 2nd Ring Road. Large scale landforms provide informal seating throughout and create a varying artificial topography. Pedestrian flow is naturally guided towards the public plaza at the northeastern corner. This square has already become a popular place from which to watch a large LED screen embedded in the facade. Towards the mall entrance, the granite stone floor folds into the angled surface of a water fountain.
CRYSTAL LOTUS
The retail podium has its primary ‘shop window’ facing towards the 2nd Ring Road with entrances to the shopping mall situated at the northeast and southeast corners of the site. The focal point of the five-storey retail atrium is taken by a crystalline cantilevering structure, nicknamed the “Crystal Lotus”. It rises from the foodcourt at basement level to support the sweeping glass roof. As its circumference grows larger towards the top, it encloses the main lift shaft and accommodates larger shops on the upper floors. Sparch thus freed up the ground floor plan for an event space underneath the Crystal Lotus’ cantilever. Accommodating almost 1,500 sqm of prime retail space within the Crystal Lotus allowed reducing the shop depths around the atrium to a workable size.
One of the client’s key parameters to designing the shopping mall’s circulation was to attract shoppers to the upper floors. With its soaring form, the Lotus draws the visitor’s eye upwards. As it modulates the space within the atrium, it makes for a constantly changing spatial experience and entices exploration. The lotus is clad in spiraling bands of glass and mirror panels that extend into the roof glazing.
On its top floor, the Crystal Lotus punctures the glazed atrium roof and allows views across the urban garden on the podium roof on Level 6. Seen from the podium roof, the Crystal Lotus presents a dramatic sculpted glass surface that reads as part of the garden landscape.
Eschewing the conventional ceiling design cluttered with incongruent light and MEP fittings, Sparch proposed to use a backlit stretch fabric as a trace of movement across the ceiling. Likewise the spiralling gallery fascia bands describe a vertical circulation path through the mall.
OFFICE LOBBY
The office lobby’s glazed geometry is formed by a series of segmented arches. These portals span between the second floor slab edges of the office tower and the retail mall. They appear cranked as they negotiate the level difference of the two slab edges they are supported from. The space gradually becomes taller towards the centre as the arches go up to 12 m high. An alcove-like space overlooks the lobby from the podium side that will house a café in the future. The walls and ceilings of the cafe and lift lobby are clad in large facets of timber louvres which continue as spiralling bands across the glazed enclosure. As the louvres filter and direct daylight, they also help conceal the usual mechanical installations.
CLUBHOUSE
The clubhouse on the podium roof is accessed from a dedicated ground floor transfer lobby at the south side of Raffles City. Upstairs the visitor arrives to a double height lobby. Its faceted space expands across the elevated swimming pool just opposite the lift doors. This unique juxtaposition with the swimming pool makes the hotel lobby appear much larger than its actual small size.
The clubhouse is clad in glass and iridescent black and white aluminium sandwich panels. The panels’ colours and sizes smoothly blend with the glazed façade of the two slab towers above. The swimming pool is located between the two slab towers and its cladding – like the office lobby – is supported by a series of parallel cranked portals. A glazed ribbon runs diagonally across the vaulted space allowing framed views of Beijing and the dramatic podium roof with its glazed roof and Crystal Lotus.
CONNECTIVE CRYSTALS
The recognisable free form elements in the project – the atrium crystal, the clubhouse, the office lobby, are strategically placed to create striking public spaces where adjacent programs connect. Their triangulated surfaces are exploited in a number of ways in order to create new spatial sequences. Firstly, they negotiate irregular façade interfaces between different building parts and then their malleable forms react to specific programmatic needs.
The Crystal Lotus has a very small footprint at the base to free up the ground floor and large areas above forming a mirrored canopy underneath its cantilever. The clubhouse skin expands to form a double height lobby space and connects this to the swimming pool and then wraps tightly around tower core and plant spaces. Likewise, the office lobby enclosure creates non-uniform environment. Various sized “alcoves” are combined within one continuous space.
ROOF LANDSCAPE
The clubhouse and the office tower enclose and embrace the roof terrace with the sculptural glazed roof at its centre. Sparch intended this place as an urban garden – another example of dynamic new ‘public rooms’ for the city. From here the user can catch glimpses of all the various activities taking place at Raffles City and catch spectacular views of the retail atrium and Crystal Lotus and the mountains beyond Beijing’s west.
FAÇADES
Shopping malls are introverted worlds where shop fronts face inwards and back walls outward. Consequently, Sparch’s strategy for the retail facades attempted to animate a skin that inherently needs to be a dumb box. The façade is clad in a pixelated pattern of black and white glass modules. A frit of in either black or white dots is applied to each façade pixel. The dots are made deliberately large in order to discern them from a large distance. An aluminum panel is set back behind the glass by 150 mm with the exact same dot pattern that is applied to the glass in front. This helps to add a sense of depth to the façade. It also creates a so-called moiré effect caused by the displacement of the two identical patterns when one looks at the façade while moving.
The pattern on the office tower deals with blurring the distinction between transparent and opaque areas. This is done by extending pixels of black dots from the spandrel panels into the bottom and top part of the vision areas.
The pixels continue from the retail podium across the facets of the clubhouse and becoming gradual as they rise up the solid parts of the two slab towers.
At night Raffles City is animated by a colourful play of LED pixels echoing the visual effect during the daytime.
