‘Cotton Lab’ is an offline store created to focus on the aesthetics of life by experiencing clothes and catering consumption in the environment of new retail format. The architect chose a ‘House in House’ design strategy which aims to build a complete new-type independent structure inside the main factory building. Two high, straight and transparent chambers of the “House in House” which go parallel in north-south direction as they adopt a standard cross-section of arch shape with sharp point in the middle but completely different in construction. One chamber for clothing which uses steel structure is totally white, which appears so charming and fashionable that it is just appropriate for clothes display.
The other chamber is a combination of steel-timber structured catering space and multifunctional space featured as comfortableness presented by the architect. Neither of the newly-added chambers occupy too much in this factory building. The broken line-shaped wooden poles hanging over head adds both intimate feeling and sense of steadiness. The main factory building applies natural ventilation as the first defence for the space to form an initial environment while two newly-added structures apply new-type ventilation system to make up an independent and fully closed air-conditioning environment separately. Such system allocation does not only solve the functional problems but also emerge eventually as a complete set of visual model fully matching to the structure in the space. The entrance lobby of the building connects with the outer space directly in addition to the connection with other sites of the “Cotton Lab”.
