Spacial

Dupont - Corian Studio

We were commissioned to design the first DuPont Corian Design Studio in Asia, located in Huashan Square in Shanghai and opened in August 2010. It was the fourth such studio in the world, following predecessors in Italy, New York and Philadelphia, and its ambition was to serve as the premier platform in the region for demonstrating how Corian could be used as a genuinely versatile design material across commercial and residential applications. Our concept was to bring Eastern and Western cultures together, drawing from the rich history of Chinese art and building techniques and combining that research with the most advanced manufacturing technology available to us. It was fitting that the Corian sample logo is a hexagon, because our parallel research into ancient Chinese construction had led us to similar mathematical structures entirely independently. The defining feature of the space is a large curved wall assembled from thousands of individual Corian bricks using a CNC machine that we designed and built specifically for the project, developing the software entirely within our own studio. The gallery was conceived as a walk-through experience of discovery, setting each object within the space as if in a museum, to give it its own importance and allow the full range of the material to be understood on its own terms.