Wuhan · High-tech medical device Advanced Manufacturing Park shared living room

The Shared Living Room of the Gaoke Medical Device Advanced Manufacturing Park is an interior project in the Optics Valley high-tech zone of Wuhan, occupying 919 square metres and completed in October 2022. It sits inside an elliptical exhibition hall deliberately inserted into a field of generic, gridded high-rise office blocks - the repetitive, efficiency-first slabs that Le Corbusier once celebrated as machines for living. The designers, led by Li Tao with team members Hu Bingsheng, Long Kecheng, Kan Wenhui and Jiang Haiyang, did not fill the raw, 9-metre-high shell with a fixed program; instead they built a flexible base for uncertain future uses, treating the emptiness itself as a subject. Evoking Malevich's Supremacist manifesto, in which objective visual phenomena are meaningless beside the emotion they awaken, the team sought an upward, almost floating feeling in a space whose two existing floor plates were not directly connected. A folded-plate stair bridges the levels, its volume made sculptural by a metal mesh suspended from the ceiling; a meeting box inserted between the second and third floors appears to float on diagonal struts, and a cantilevered stair along the wall leads to a rooftop corridor crossed by a high-level bridge. An X-shaped, purely formal member reaching between floor and ceiling acts as a measuring device for the tall void and animates it instantly. Orange is the theme colour - applied to the floating meeting box, the stair and the handrails - set deliberately against the exposed raw concrete beams, columns and slabs for a sharp old-versus-new, texture and colour contrast. Two conical cylinders, one white and one Klein blue, pretend to support the upper slab and in fact play spatial games of visual weight, while platforms at different heights look out at one another like layered mountain peaks. The oblique, interpenetrating lines pay quiet homage to Peter Eisenman's deconstructivism and push Suprematist emotion toward a materialised architecture: space is only the surface, emotion is the point. Photography by Cijian Architectural Photography - Zhao Yilong.