A Vision of the Future, Brought to Life
We began by talking about an "approximate future": not a precise forecast, but the broad direction that today's knowledge, trends and possibilities point towards. By the time the space was finished, the value of the design spoke for itself. Beyond its pure, uncompromising expression, HIGOLD's office floor offers something deeper and more sincere.
Chapter 1 · The Revelation of the Future
When the "future" is no longer a distant word but something we experience now, what form should it take? And as we discuss AI and the future in our daily work, how do we define a new paradigm? This finished office may be a first answer. It concerns not only how people understand and perceive the future, but how we turn ideas about the future into real design today.
Ten years ago, the film Ex Machina asked what artificial intelligence really is, how we might tell whether it is "human", and how we could live alongside it. Today those questions have taken concrete spatial form. Each office here is like a self-contained cabin inside a spacecraft, a futuristic fusion of technology and space.
The floor is organised around a central core, with a ring of meeting-room pods forming a "lost-in-space" route around it. The irregular layout and shifting viewpoints keep visitors curious to explore. The curve of the porthole windows carries on into the curved walls, creating smooth visual transitions and adding depth and openness to the space.
The flowing, interlocking plan breaks down the closed feel of the conventional office while avoiding a layout that is dense and compact for its own sake, showing how much more flexible and open the office of the future can be.
A careful balance of solid partitions and glass weighs privacy against openness. Free of both the rigid grid of the traditional office and the monotony of high-density workspace, the floor answers the varied needs of future work while giving room to flexibility and interaction.
Light and curved surfaces weave together, giving HIGOLD's office floor a mysterious quality somewhere between the real and the illusory. As people pass through, their lines of sight cross and reflect between the rooms in a curious dialogue with the future. Through this finely tuned choreography of views, we seem to catch the moment of looking down at the ground through a porthole. From certain angles, the future comes into view.
Chapter 2 · A Moment of Declaration
Space is not merely a physical container but a medium for perception and experience. The conference centre is the heart of the office floor: a working room, and at the same time a space that sets out a vision of future work, declaring in every detail what office life can become.
A diamond-pattern metal mesh ceiling and orange light combine into an immersive, cabin-like atmosphere. The walls are lined with acoustic felt, and a striking elliptical light screen hangs above the podium. Metal meets warm light, and large panoramic windows connect the meeting room seamlessly with the city outside. Layered space and shifting light and shadow create a deep, mysterious sense of the future.
As ideas collide in the meeting room, it feels like flying through the air, and the boundary between the room and the city blurs and is redrawn, both visually and in the senses.
Custom curved training tables can be joined freely to suit different kinds of meeting: an elliptical ring encourages discussion, while a fan-shaped arrangement suits training. The bespoke furniture serves its function and creates a distinctive visual effect of its own.
Chapter 3 · Building What Is Seen
The reception desk continues the streamlined design language. Through the wall's inclined openings it merges with the space around it, like the cockpit of an interstellar spacecraft.
The floating floors and multi-dimensional spaces of futurist films are still hard to build in full, but they inspire us to make further use of vertical and underground space, and they belong to humanity's exploration of what space can be.
In this design we extended the space vertically. In the atrium, a double-height void enriches the spatial layers, and the "wild growth" of climbing vines on exposed concrete columns gives the design a raw vitality, an organic fusion of space and nature. Mirrored ceilings reflect the surrounding city and dissolve the boundaries of the space.
The project is an experiment in the futurist office. It sets out to break free of conventional office forms and to consider how work will change under the pressure of new technology, shifting social values and evolving needs. While raising the company's efficiency, it signals the brand's appetite for exploring the future and breaking new ground, and encourages it to seek new possibilities in every field.
Client
HIGOLD
Location
Shunde District, Foshan, Guangdong, China
Area
1,090 m²
Completion Date
2024.10
Architecture
Pininfarina Architecture
Design Firm
E Studio
Lead Designer
Fan, Junjian
Zhou, Xuanzhuo
Design Team
Liu, Shuqi
Fang, Guiyun
Guo, Chao
Zhou, Jing
Photographer
WM Studio