The Miro Store of Duoyun Bookstore, Dream La Miro

Fairy tales lift a corner of the curtain of memory, revealing the childlike world we have long forgotten, yet we have lost our wings of flight; in the bland adult world, childhood is but a pure and innocent dream. Wutopia Lab designed the fairy-tale family bookstore Duoyun Bookstore Miro Store for the Jiangsu Taoli Chunfeng Cultural and Creative Town, completed in October in Yancheng. The designer was moved by the Italian artist Cristina Lastrego's animated works Mir the Cat, The Circus, and The Creation, and decided to use the origin of life as the primary inspiration, combining elements of the other two animations to create an unprecedented fairy-tale bookstore. The ark serves as the theme: a yellow-exterior, red-interior vessel docks in the harbor of the sea of books. All the fairy tales of Duoyun Miro begin here. The octagonal tower, originally outside the design scope, was persuaded into the project and becomes the lighthouse standing in the harbor, designed as a book tower. At its center, a red spiral staircase connects two floors of white bookshelves; when readers ascend and look up at the center of the pitched roof, they notice the sun squeezing into the roof, and everything in the room begins from that sun. Beyond the white skylight book tower lies an abstract black forest: black metal rods of varying density support a black openwork metal roof; when sunlight strikes, light filters through green gaps and dapples the black ground like a woodland. At the end of the forest corridor stands a cloud door, a symbol established at Duoyun Huangyan; looking through the cloud door, a new world beckons, and a moon is visible, answering the sun above the book tower. Behind the cloud door is the cloud-themed family area, Cloud Terrace Cafe, where white gradient perforated aluminum transitions to brushed stainless steel, forming layered, interlocking floating terraces where readers seem to walk or rest among the clouds.