Set within the Chengdu’s Yintai Center, this new Zhongshuge bookstore designed by X+Living embodies the cultural charm of this populous Chinese city. The street culture of Chengdu has become a unique landscape, with its cultural atmosphere and remarkable leisure, running through every person’s life, and properly showing its elegance.
Taking the mall escalator to the fourth floor, visitors can see the familiar Zhongshuge label on the text curtain wall at the entrance of the bookstore, in order to integrate it better with the charming city of Chengdu. After the curtain wall X+Living has placed a space full of “bamboo shaped book shelves”. The wall follows the using of stable bookshelf shape of Zhongshuge, which makes visitors feel familiar even though it was their first time to come. Small tables on the floor which looks like “bamboo shoots” stand within this vibrant space.
Walking through the ‘Bamboo Dorest of Book Shelves’ to the right, is the children area, a jungle-paradise-like world. The walls are covered with book shelves in the form of a bamboo forest, classical houses, windmills, and playful pandas. “Big Mushrooms” scatter on the continuing boardwalk, shielding the children who reading books under them. Certainly, mirror ceiling, as another symbol of Zhongshuge, is also applied to this area.
The vaguely visible red brick wall on the left side of the “bamboo forest” is the most distinctive place in this Zhongshuge. In this 5 meters high space, the red brick wall piled up to the top and circled independent small zones. A walking path above goes around the walls to allow readers to find their favorite book in the tall shelves across this part of the bookstore.
all images © Shao Feng