A Different intelligent exhibition hall:  living in the city and wandering in the mountains

Preface:

A thousand years ago, Tao Yuanming said farewell to his official career and returned to his countryside home. He wrote: "Being in a cage for a long time and now return to nature again."

In nowadays, urban community live in a way of living which is disconnected to the rural communities. However, the urban individuals have enough consumption power to plan and build their ideal image about the nature, which is designed based on the impression given by their experience of living in the countryside among the rural communities.

When Closing The Door, It Feels Like Being In The Deep Mountain

The entrance of the Boke intelligent exhibition hall is designed in the form of a small art gallery.

To erase the visual perception about spatial distance between the audience and the exhibition hall, there set a plain, simple shadow wall to build up an inner push entrance. The door is hidden and also is around the shadow wall. The induction door silently slide open, to portray a motion of getting into the air of an ink painting.

As the atrium is built at the middle of the shadowy corridor, it stands a real landscape. The lake stones show their peaks, the water appears as deep and quiet. The circumference of the lamp illuminating like the moon. A stone in larger size looks depicts itself as a guard in an artistic way.

This view immerses the audience within an landscape painting -- the smoke slowly rises as the mountain haze and curls the stone mountain; then the music rings out to make the artistic conception more ethereal.

By discovering the deeper part of the scene, a thin rock looks like the mountain by placing in the water. There are two mountains face each other across the pound; they are far from each other, but by observing them from another angel, they become near to each other. This creates an untrimmed visual effect, and builds a quiet and plain aura.

Once one stands in the exhibition hall, the view shall punch in the audiences' sight and be touchable to the viewer's heart. It echoes what the sages have said in the ancient age: " the closed door is the deep mountains." And this is an immersive visual effect which the designer Lao Gao intends to achieve by being the exhibition hall designer.

What to do to lead people quickly return to the peacefulness in their daily lives? How could people forget the worries in their heart and pay all their attention to the present scene?

According to Lao Gao, the most sufficient way of solving this problem is to put an ordinary thing in an extraordinary place. So he left the best location of the whole smart exhibition hall to a stone that can be seen everywhere among the mountains.

But the stone does not meant the simple natural stone, but points to the artistic one being designed, cut, polished and being placed in the artificially constructed cloudy mountain scene. The cut stone presents a simple texture; it shows a modesty and steady gesture. When looking at the stone, it brings the audience back to the ancient time and embody the eternality of the existed old aesthetics.

The design does not only lead our embody experience through the simple perception, but to bring the viewer to the world contains only the pure charm and vitality that forms the material world.

Lao Gao has created a wonderful place in this intelligent exhibition hall with the most ordinary stones in the mountains.

 "Design "Made Out of Nothing"

The intelligent exhibition hall, as the name suggests, displays a comfortable living space under the assistance of modern high-tech technology.

With the influence of the ancient Chinese culture, it is believed that the master pursuit not only the technique of utilising the sword but processing their own ideologies about the sword in their mind; and thus the technique no longer is the most significant in their practice. An advanced design also is suppose to be like "having the sword in hands but also having one's own ideology about the sword in mind" -- every detail appears as reasonable and logical, and thus shows a natural looking. In such a space which contains visual elements originate from both the idealistic and the realistic lives, the hardware and software of intelligent life are embedded in it with no evidence of trace.

The design concept in this case is different from the minimalism style which is popularized in the market; the office looks forward to be ground-breaking and thus the chief designer Lao Gao attempts to make the view as there is nothing.

The customer has no specific requirements about the exhibition hall, nor the model of the target or the abstract outlook.  The requirement just says that he would not take any design style in designing his space.

In the chats, Lao Gao learns that customers love to go to the mountains and the seaside to empty his minds; then he catches his core needs -- the people who love the mountains and oceans usually love freedom, and do not like boundaries and restrictions.

The design inspiration emerges immediately and it is transformed from a Chinese word: 内观 （vipassana）

Vipassana emphasizes focus. To perceive everything better in nature, it needs a sharp sensitivity and thus the people require an environment to make them focus and sharpen the sensitivity.

The fast pace or life in the urban areas might make one becomes impatient and thus its body and mind run by following an impetuous routine. One needs to calm the body and the mind, so it live under each moment in a better mood, and thus the five senses could precisely feel the beauty of the nature and any creature of the nature.

Then as being an intelligent exhibition hall, it presents not only the product itself but represent the good idea which the designer hopes to bring to the people, as well. On one hand, the five senses build up a sufficient communication between the audience and the designer; and on another hand, as the peaceful and delightful aura and the scene which being transformed from the natural view facilitate the more spiritual speak between the designer and the viewer, it evokes the deep inner childhood memories and thus build a spiritual home of the audiences. This helps the audience to erase their worries and impetuousness, which are being gained from the busy urban lives; and thus the design reaches the ultimate goal according to the will of the designer.

This is how the blueprint of the 700 square meters of the "city light" building is produced. It is a minimalised psychological-ecological natural environment being created within the building.

The Heart-To-Heart Communication Has The Magic

By having the inspiration, it moves to the process of adjusting the spatial structure.

It is not easy to plan the structural management in the messy original version of the space, because it has many corners and columns. So the first step is to unknit the space to make it to be able to present a series of irregular blocks to do functional areas.

"The challenge is that the inner space is constructed in diverse forms, so it may show different visual effects after the construction. But the overall space is structured and neat." said Lao Gao.

The space planning is very similar to clothing a calligraphy -- after having the rough plan about the spatial management, we are going to pursue leveling and correction. This might be dangerous, but probably would be better than how it is imagined by having a good preparation.

This procedure, metaphorically say, is a game by viewing from the perspective of the designers. It is a process of working on to the ontological phenomenon and shift the object's appearance by touching its being, and then re-view this phenomenon with knowing both the phenomenon's being and the being of the phenomenon.

The space exists as pure ontological but the idea is metaphysical. To substantialize the idea through the spatial expression, the designer might have to act against his intuition and the finalised view will present as a spectacle which refresh the audiences' eyes and minds due to its innovativeness.

When the breeze blows through the hollow walls of the verandah, it forms an infinite extension among the space. It mirrors the view that the two rocks represents a mysterious image that the invisible mountain hides behind the visible one.

The circle-like tour line leads the audience to move from the start point, to travel across the dinning room, the negotiation area, the conference room, the teahouse, and the video room; after traveling around the space the audience goes back to the start point, which also plays the role as the end point at that moment.

Each area is not closely near to each other but follows the tour trail of being constantly connected though the arches on the walls. The air may smoothly move around when opening the windows as it utilises techniques such as the French Windows and other techniques.

The spatial management contains many details while the whole management is centered on the atrium design. According to the designer, the most outstanding part would be the living room. Its atrium is completed by an electric window so after the window curtain is closed the room would be filled by a warm atmosphere. As the smart scene changes, the lights dimmer controls the fireplace to rise the white smoke and transform the living room to be a suitable meditation place. When pulling up the electric curtain, the atrium turns into a sky-looked background. It allows the audience to feel like being in the forest by hearing the sound of the far-away watery-stone scene. The audience, even though sitting in the hall but still hear the water sound and may feel that sitting beside the stream in a forest.

The Intelligent Life Focuses On The Instantaneity

The essence of an intelligent life is the instantaneity.

The designed space serves its purpose of satisfying the users' needs. It combines the creativity on the spatial and the visual senses to make the spatial management fits people's need according to the designer's humanistic perspective.

The marble is Lao Gao, the chief designer's preference in designing the hall. However, it may illustrate a sharp and oppressive quality; this quality probably will not ease the audiences' impetuousness but reinforce their feeling of nerve and anxiety.

But Lao Gao still decides to use the marble due to the material's thick and vital quality. The material may also coordinate well under the whole environment. So as Gao is confident about the performance of the marble, he uses the pickling treatment in order to enhance the marble's capability of light absorption. It thus creates a pearly soft lighting effect within the hall.

The material erases its sharp and oppressive quality as what the designer expected it to be -- when the audiences stand in the space they mostly pay attention on the elegancy and the warmth which being expressed through the spatial atmosphere but only notice the marble when looking at it carefully and then learn that the marble is everywhere in the space.

The first the designer has to do is finds his own heart, the being directed by the free well being leaded by his heart. The Yan Sutra says in its paragraph: " The heart shows no figure according to the visual sense but exists according to its own existence."

All in all, the heart of the designer is the most miraculous among all the designer's creatures  .