I-HILL Shopping Mall

Hengfeng Phase II is a central landmark at the city level. Its architectural design reproduces the landscape features of high mountains, flowing waters and lounge bridges in a unique form, making the best use of the circumstances and perfectly interpreting the humanistic concept of  "expressing  emotions with natural mountains and rivers". It was designed by UNStudio.
As a new focus of the mountain city with slow life, its tower building is in combination with the functions of office, hotel and high-end residence with attracting high-end consumer groups as the goal to create a central high-end life circle and a new city memory. With exploring new brand strategies as the purpose for design, the commercial complex project of its podium building not only aims to solve the problem in moving line for the original building, but also will create a new and unique commercial scene of Hengfeng 2.0 to drive commerce with brand effect and create a new peak for this city.
Thus, in the context of currently underdeveloped urban commerce, with creating a commercial landmark brand as the goal, "H" of Hengfeng Group has been extracted for the project and extended to HILL, referring to a new peak of commerce, while "i", extracted for the project, refers to local and unique as the imprint of a super symbol. Based on this, i-HILL was born. It carries the future visions of this city and represents the opening of a new era for Hengfeng Company, meaning the iteration and upgrade for new commerce.
Just like exploring the mysteries of a cave, we are exploring the pioneering and immersive shopping experience exclusive to this mountain city. Therefore, the design concept originates  from KARST CAVE with a sense of mystery resulting from local Getu landscapes. A three-dimensional, warm and characteristic miniature scene has been created by the MAG design team from multiple dimensions in combination  with local conditions including geographical features, humanistic environment and life attitudes.
Unknown things, expectation and exploration come into view when entering the cave. The design will revolutionize the viewing experience of the original shopping center at a stroke, taking advantage of the structure of the original building to create out-of-order entrances and making the whole shopping center mysterious with flexible and fascinating vertical moving lines.
Several problems result from the overlong passage left in the original building plane due to the distance between the core tube and the column grid of the original building, including narrow main moving lines at the entrance, unidirectional moving lines, interruption of commercial moving lines by the core tube and an excess of cold sectors for shops. Therefore, designers will carry out space transformation again and make use of elevation design and floor-to-ceiling windows with a large area to let the sunshine into the space and open up the sense of space for the passage while changing defects into a space focus and creating a warm and comfortable habitat in the cave.
Changeable scenes while moving steps are the biggest highlight of the whole project. The design of four major characteristic areas enables tourists to see different views at every step and have different impressions at every corner... Such a charming and subtle space relation is extremely fascinating.
Stairs are not passages here. They are rotary climbing  stairs integrated into the CAVE and the only access to  exploration, conveying that all structures are interconnected  and all designs are vital.
A problem of the three-to-five-story double-height core tube results from the fact that the tower building is located in the center of the podium building. With this as the key point of space, the MAG design team has created an open form with web influence, turning weaknesses into strengths and constructing another characteristic area in the shopping mall.
In addition, the design of various "passages for exploration" is combined with characteristics of local stilted buildings while variation and unevenness of spatial volume make the exploration more uncertain and add more display surfaces to shops, elevating the whole commercial atmosphere.
Daylighting while "reaching the peak" is comparable to the natural light pouring down at the entrance, and the Tyndall phenomenon brings the whole space closer to nature, which makes the space not limited to the building. It seems to stretch upward infinitely, which makes people want to both explore and stop...