Golden A' Design Award Winner 2021
Kris Lin's Skylight Sales Center represents a distinguished achievement in contemporary commercial interior architecture, demonstrating how exhibition and sales environments might transcend purely functional requirements to create spaces of genuine architectural aspiration and experiential depth. The design engages with traditions of parametric geometry and tectonic expression that have animated progressive architectural discourse, translating complex computational possibilities into warm, materially grounded spatial experiences that invite extended contemplation. The ceiling treatment emerges as the compositional centerpiece, where triangulated wood-clad panels create a dramatic overhead landscape of folded planes, their faceted geometry generating visual complexity while maintaining coherent formal logic. This approach suggests affinities with historical coffered ceiling traditions while advancing contemporary interests in non-orthogonal geometries and digitally-informed surface articulation. The material palette demonstrates sophisticated restraint, pairing warm wood tones with cool stone surfaces to establish thermal and chromatic dialogue across the vertical axis, while bronze-toned metal elements provide precise accents that unify the spatial envelope. Natural light enters strategically through the glazed facade, activating the geometric ceiling surfaces with graduated illumination that transforms throughout the day, ensuring the space offers continuously evolving atmospheric conditions. The central architectural model serves as both functional display and spatial anchor, its miniature towers echoing the aspirational verticality suggested by the soaring interior volume. The layered transparency achieved through vertical louver screens creates depth and mystery while allowing visual connectivity between zones. One might consider how the design balances monumentality with intimacy, how geometric complexity coexists with material warmth, and how commercial function achieves architectural dignity.
This is a sales center in a community in Yiwu, China. The biggest problem the project designer faced is that the interior space is relatively deep. Also, there is no large glass curtain wall on the exterior of the building, which blocks the natural light and leads to poor indoor lighting. The design strategy is to employ skylights and introduces natural light in through the fifth facade of the building, thereby solving the problem of insufficient lighting in the interior space.