Movie: in this exclusive video interview from Inside Festival, Joakim Lyth of Wingårdhs explains how the Swedish architecture firm used brightly-coloured curved glass to draw customers inside its Emporia shopping centre.
It features two gaping entrances made out of brightly-coloured curved glass, one amber and one blue.
“Two main entrances lead people into the shopping centre,” says Lyth. “They are formed by a double-curved glass [structure]. They should drag people inside the shopping centre.”
The use of coloured glass continues throughout the building to help lead customers through the shopping centre’s figure-of-eight plan.
“The coloured glass goes through the whole of the building, different colours are used in different circulation hubs,” Lyth explains. “One of the problems with a shopping centre is that they’re usually quite hard to find your way around. So [using] strong colours, giving a strong atmosphere and identity to different hubs seemed like a reasonable idea.”
He adds: “The figure-of-eight is quite a common feature when it comes to shopping centres. The curved shape gives you a hint of what’s hiding behind the next corner.”
The building features residential and office units on the levels above the shopping centre, as well as a publicly accessible roof garden on the top.
“The municipality demanded that the greenery we took with the shopping centre should be given back,” Lyth says. “The roof has no commercial value, so it’s just a place where you can relax.”
The whole project took five years to complete. Lyth says a shopping centre the size of Emporia only became viable in Malmö when the Öresund Bridge, which connects Sweden to Denmark, opened in 2000.
“It made part of Malmö, where Emporia now is situated, closer to the international airport of Copenhagen than Copenhagen itself,” he says. “That was a tremendous shift in the region and made it possible for [the site where Emporia was built] to gain a lot of new value.”
Despite the large number of shopping centres in the area, Lyth believes Emporia stands out.
“The building is performing pretty well,” he says. “I think that people really like the atmosphere, the ambience. It’s something different than the normal shopping centre.”
Joakim Lyth of Wingårdh Arkitektkontor
Inside Festival 2013 took place at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore from 2 to 4 October. The next Inside Festival will take place at the same venue from 1 to 3 October 2014. Award entries are open February to June 2014.
A gigantic golden chasm welcomes visitors to this shopping centre in Malmö by Swedish architects Wingårdhs (+ slideshow).
Located to the south of the city in Hyllie, the Emporia shopping centre is Wingårdhs‘ first realised building from a competition-winning masterplan of proposed housing and office blocks. Once all the buildings have been completed, the “amber entrance” will be the only section of the shopping centre visible from the surrounding new streets.
“The main idea of our winning competition entry was to hide inward-looking retail behind a wreath of residential and commercial buildings,” said the architects.
The curving golden glass stretches across a gridshell structure, which curves up and back to allow daylight to penetrate the entrance courtyard. From here, shoppers are led towards three storeys of retail arranged around a figure-of-eight plan.
Photograph by Perry Nordeng
The roof of the structure accommodates a large park with a faceted landscape made up of lawns, terraces and pavilions.
Photograph by Perry Nordeng
“In the future the roof will be developed with outdoor dining and a spa facility,” added the architects. “Like amusement parks, shopping centres need to offer new attractions at regular intervals.”
Photograph by Perry Nordeng
Atriums in bold shades of blue, green and red help shoppers to navigate the building, while the adjoining car park can be identified by an assortment of coloured panels.
Emporia is first and foremost an urban planning project in which offices, housing, and retail come together in a mixed-use development along Boulevarden and Stationsgatan in Hyllie, on the south side of Malmö. The main idea of our winning competition entry was to hide inward-looking retail behind a wreath of residential and commercial buildings. The whole shopping complex would thereby eventually become integrated into the fabric of the city.
Photograph by Traian Cimpeanu
It is a huge development, of which only the corner building with the Amber Entrance has yet been completed. This entrance will be the only part of the Emporia shopping centre that remains visible when the development is completely built out. The idea of lining the streets with mixed-use buildings demanded a strong form that could attract visitors from Station Square to come in and shop. A sequence of vaults from a previous competition proposal, along with a memory from the Pantheon, reemerged in a bronze-ochre tone. Double-bent glass encloses the diagonal slit that cuts through the building. Here the weather of the Öresund Strait, its fast-moving clouds chasing glimpses of sun, becomes present and tangible.
The diagonal entrance from Hyllie Station Square leads deep into the block. Inside, retail is organised around a three-storey figure eight. Shops are grouped together around boldly coloured atriums, each with a different theme. On the north side of the complex, a ramp leads into a rainbow-coloured parking garage (for 2500 cars) with direct access to the figure eight. To the east is a surface parking lot (for 500) right outside the supermarket.
The rooftop park is designed as a bit of cultivated nature. Its vegetation (sedum, prairie grass, and trees) and its sun-facing, wind-sheltered patios are accessible from both inside and outside the building. The hills that provide protection from the wind are actually hiding mechanical rooms. In the future the roof will be developed with outdoor dining and a spa facility—like amusement parks, shopping centres need to offer new attractions at regular intervals.
Emporia can expand upward and to the west, but not in any of the other directions. The freestanding residential buildings facing Boulevarden have yet to be built, as do those that will stand atop the podium along Stationsgatan on the south side.
Emporia’s interior challenges established shopping centre conventions. Its bold colours and bent sight lines break with the norm, as do the project’s size and ambition—which have made it possible to do custom designs for everything from ceilings, floors, and storefronts to signage, ropes of hanging plants, furniture, and cast glass door handles.
Our motto has been “no intermediate scale” — because that is the realm of the products on display. Large-scale patterns and intricate details characterise the interior. The terrazzo floor is typical of this approach, with its oversized triangular joint pattern, its gradual shift from white to graphite in seven steps, and its flashing inclusions of coloured mirror glass. The design has been wrought with extraordinary attention to detail, down to the leather-wrapped handrails and the colour of the stitching on the built-in seating.
Emporia also includes a quantity of art seldom seen in a commercial environment. A lighting installation (ninety-nine bollards) by Petteri Nisunen and Tommi Grönlund lifts the Amber Entrance, bronze sculptures by Joep van Lieshout and a glass art piece (4 x 81 m) by Silja Rantanen adorn the Sea Entrance, and a line painting on film at an extremely outsized format (20 x 114 m) by Per Mårtensson clads the façade of the parking garage. On the interior is a series of photos by Signe Maria Andersen.
Architect: Wingårdhs through, Gert Wingårdh, Johan Eklind and Joakim Lyth Interior architect: Wingårdhs through, Helena Toresson Graphic design: Wingårdhs through, Jennie Stolpe Landscape design: Thyréns AB (Anders Dahl, Pamela Sjöstrand) Landscape design (roof park): Wingårdhs, Landskapsgruppen Öresund AB Client: Steen & Ström Sverige AB
Last week The Conference was held in Sweden’s southernmost city of Malmö and Cool Hunting was in attendance. The centerpiece of this exciting five-day media smörgåsbord was an intense 48 hours of conferences and parties, sandwiched…
The following information is provided by the architects:
Très Bien shop – Headquarters Architecture/ Concept
Très Bien Shop’s collections are displayed in a building with great character and space in central Malmö, Sweden.
The space has previously housed a textile factory as well as a flea market, which becomes apparent when checking out the well-worn wooden floor. When we started the project, the space was divided into a number of different-sized rooms with skewed logistics and hierarchy. The new architectural concept gives the room functional logistics and clear, built-in flexibility.
Très Bien Shop is a growing company, and it was impossible to determine exactly how the space would be used one or two years from now. Therefore, we designed a very flexible layout.
Currently, the majority of Très Bien Shop’s sales are made online and there’s a need for regular photo shoots to keep the web shop updated. Therefore, a new photo studio plays a central role in the design and is the only room dividing the overall space.
The photo studio is mobile and can be slid to different positions and adjust the space between warehouse and store. The exterior of the studio is paneled with mirrors, making it subtly disappear, and making it useful from all angles. The designed furniture features—racks, tables and shelves—are made in stainless steel and are designed as loose, moveable furniture. The entrance to the shop has a solid, glossy concrete floor. The weathered wooden floor of the store/warehouse section has been left intact and act as a contrast to the mirrors, concrete and stainless steel.
The idea is that the environment should serve as a somewhat anonymous and subtle complement to clothing collections of diverse character.
Location: Friisgatan 6 Malmö, Sweden Year: 2010-2011 Status: Built Program: Retail store/ photo studio/ storage/ office space Area: 400 Sqm Team: Johan Arrhov, Henrik Frick
Swedish designers TAF have completed the interior of a store for shoe brand Camper in Malmö, Sweden, based on ice cream colours and lolly sticks. (more…)
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
