SOFA Court

Location: Chengdu, Sichuan, China

Client: Chengdu Blue Ray Real Estate Development Co ltd

Building Floor Area:  110,000sqm     Site area: 31,400sqm

Completion: 2012

Design Team: J Wu, W Yin, R He,

The annual number of overcast days in Chengdu is significantly smaller than those of most Chinese cities, which means that the solar orientation is less vital than many others. The local regulations also ease the requirements for solar access which in other cities could be compulsory for every single household. This allows to plan with higher density and land-using efficiency by planning enclosed building blocks rather than only south-facing rows. It helps for a project like this whose brief and planning outline give extremely high FAR as 4.0.  All high-rise residential towers are grouped along the perimeter of the site; this also helps to create a bigger central garden with swimming pool and soft/hard landscapes.

As the project targets on the first-time buyers from younger generation, the brief calls for small unit apartments. The tidy area schedule and demand to use land efficiently result in narrow frontage for individual units. To avoid losing control on fenestration coordination, the horizontal lines are employed to integrate various types of building components such as window sills, balcony balustrades and beam soffit etc., whose minor differences in height are ignored and re-calibrated. By this means, the horizontal boundary of adjacent units are blurred to reach simplicity in forms. On the other hand, colors on most the building components, no matter terracotta tiling or mineral paints, are unified to subtle dark grey to form a backdrop, on top of which the alloy louvers covering A/C chambers are powder coated in colors to build up vibrant mosaics. These five colors are arranged in such an order that no one is the same as the adjacent one. All measures aim to breaks the normal impression of residential buildings, particular those on the competitive market.