‘Yuyuan Garden—Chenghuang Temple—Huabao Building—Wutong Books’

Yuyuan Garden is a famous traditional Jiangnan garden, which was first constructed in Ming Dynasty with a history of over 400 years. Chenghuang Temple is an important Taoist temple in Shanghai context. Moreover, it is the most prosperous and prestigious tourist attraction. Wutong Books silently grows in Huabao Building in Chenghuang Temple—such a busy place. It has bright eyes staring at the traditional Chenghuang streets and overlooking the future Shanghai center.

‘Elegant Recreation’

With time goes by, the traditional business model of Chenghuang Temple is becoming out of date. We hope to give a rebirth to the traditional culture of Yuyuan Garden by a modern expressio. “There are some elegant persons constructing gardens for recreation” (). The core concept of Wutong Books is ‘Elegant Recreation’, which means creating space with ‘recreation experience’ of Jiangnan garden in the ‘elegant place’ of Shanghai culture.

‘Book & Wall’

‘Book’ is the carrier of culture and the core value of Wutong. ‘Wall’ plays an important role in the traditional Chinese gardens. It is not only the sign of separating or enclosing space, but also a sort of language to guide the behavior of people and shape the scene. The design integrates the relationship between ‘Book’ and ‘Wall’ in a geometric way to create a cultural space with an Eastern atmosphere.

‘Theme & Place’

Wutong Books is rich in content and forms within a not-big scale. The design of the bookstore tries to shape a series of impressive nodes, such as photography point, chatting point, reading point, meditation point, communication point, memorizing point and so on. Wutong is not only a bookstore, but also a cultural place where people can have interactions.

‘Corridor and Route’

‘Corridors’ are the arteries of traditional gardens. The corridors of Wutong Books, on the one hand, are the visual focus of Eastern atmosphere as a garden element expression. On the other hand as elements connecting space, they create an experience of accessibility. The so-called ‘traditional twist’ is nothing more than the connections between corridors.

‘Scenery and windows’

‘Scenery’ is the goal of creating gardens. There are a series of ways to creating sceneries, such as placing barriers, symmetry views, fusing good views in human sights, putting sceneries into construction element as a painting and etc. However, the pursuit of Wutong is not to create scenery deliberately, but a series of sceneries inadvertently discovered by different people during some accidental stays in various time, which defines ‘scenery everywhere’.

Wutong Bookstore is a cultural harbor with elegance and peace in this messing business world. During the ‘elegant recreation’, people could meet long-awaited themselves. Just like the sentence——Every meet is a reunion.

Design office: Yushe Design

Design team: Xu Yi   Chen Xiao   Gao Fei   Li Keke   Wang Bingke   Wang Xiaosong   Gao Shantong

Photographer: Wang Bingke