Zhiwai Office | Haiyang Jin

The Zhiwai project is a unique presence that meets the needs of everyday office space functions, while also infusing vitality into the urban community.

 Located in Nanjing Artist Workshop in China, Zhiwai creates a new kind of work-life balance in the commercial area. The designer uses height differences between the original building and the new elements to surround a sunken hub for rest and socializing -- the rooftop garden. The space is an extension area of the indoor office space, used to express the designer's personality and specific spatial attributes, while inadvertently providing a great place for the city to relax.

With the height difference of the site, the “bridge”appears at a certain angle, acting as a medium of transition between the indoor and outdoor spaces. Walking along the “bridge”, people pass an open bar area and pass through the door to reach a corridor that connects the various internal functional spaces. To define the difference in space, two new irregular boxes have been placed on the original building frame by the designer to ensure that the living room area protrudes from the building's exterior wall. The bar area is composed of eaves, exterior corridors, and semi-open enclosures, combining to form a soft visual entrance.

The bar area connects the interior and exterior in the form of a functional complement, accommodating after-work breaks, daily gatherings, and group celebrations. With the appropriate facade opening towards the terrace, the view from near to far outlines the city skyline and gradually becomes discernible.

The design of the living room facade window provides a glimpse of the city landscape, while also leveraging the dynamic light and shadows of the outdoor water to its fullest, thus eliminating the necessity of its physical presence. Due to height differences, the prominent living room creates an overhanging structural form, thus forming an intimate relationship between interior and exterior.

The square-shaped facade includes a diagonal section, which intentionally forms an angle echo with the "bridge" road at the entrance, connecting the spaces and increasing interest by ensuring that the window can see the "bridge", and the "bridge" can see the window. The circular window openings transform light into columns, with tremendous light and shadows wandering along the ground and wall, rendering the lines of the space three-dimensional and transforming the interior into a "container of light".

To reflect the space’s comfortable atmosphere and vitality, and to be suitable for intimate gatherings, the overall palette is skin tone. As the hub of the space, with a random placement of furniture and free furnishings of utensils, the living room displays aesthetic taste and self-consistent ways of getting along with the world.

Zhiwai is a romantic space that cannot be defined purely in terms of a commercial office. Instead, it is an exploration of an alternative possibility for office space guided by a principle of "work, rather than follow a routine", with presentations of the essence and meaning of life. And as night sets in, the space transforms into a completely different scene.
Technical sheet

Project Name: Zhiwai

Project Location: Nanjing

Construction Scale: 260㎡

Design Company: DSArchstudios

Creative Design: Haiyang Jin

Participatory Design: Wang Jing, Xu Yue

Execution Deepening: Wang Zhongming, Wang Shengqiankun

 Photography: STUDIO TEN / Tan Xiao