Nowadays, bookshops have been taking up a great part of offline entertainment and become an indispensable component of grand shopping malls. However, choices of site location are limited and restricted by various commercial concerns. Turtlehill Design believes such constrains and challenges can also lead to intriguing outcomes if we response in a straightforward way.

CallmeMosaic Bookshop, is situated at 4th Floor of a shopping Mall at Foshan. Originally, the site was planned to be a place selling local cultural products. The shape of the site is a pocket with approximately 9 meter wide and 40 meter deep. It has a relatively narrow opening to the street and is surrounded by other stores. Under this condition, how to form a enchanting image to attract customers’ interest is the question designer should answer to at the first place.

We attempted to blow this 500 m2 interior site up into a imaginary urban scale so that we could address urban design maneuvers to find out solutions. In this scheme, bookshelves are referred to as individual buildings, cafes as urban plazas, seats and plants as urban parks, children areas as suburban parks, main pathways as boulevards, corridors as high-speed ring roads…… The height of bookshelves from street frontage to the end are growing to create a gradient gesture. Bookshelves as individual buildings are elaborately arranged and shifted horizontally to shape the spaces between them and generate urban walking system, including winding pavements and scattering green spaces. This provides more walking fun to customers when exploring this store. As a outdoor park, children area , surrounded by strip-like buildings, can be a habitable stairs to hold activities and sharing sessions. Moreover, parents can sit and lean on the stairs to rest and relax.

However, suffering from the changing circumstance of the mall, the bookshop unfortunately went out of business after several months. And it, in some sense, has become an “invisible city”.