Flow as urban effect
Wallpaper’s Best Business Hotel 2012

amba Hotel is a 200 room boutique hotel and with the 24hr book store Eslite and Muji on its lower floors. Inspired by its exciting site Shimenting- a place of vibrant youth energy, dizzying signages and high traffic- The hotel’s design concept interprets the seething chaos of the dynamic site into a 10-story urban effect of flow patterns visible from blocks away.

Scripting is used to derive the flow pattern on the 30 year old building quickly and “naturally”. A highly effective means to systematize and rationalize the existing ad hoc openings and vents, scripting absorbs facade irregularities as movement criteria, maps them into quantitative parameters, and finally transcribes them into construction drawings for the facade.

Sandwiched between tall buildings, the Street Salon is the outdoor urban lobby and bar entrance to the hotel. It is wrapped in a skin of custom PET fringes that flow and sway to the wind, a solar shading design that transforms into a soft haze lit by fiber optics after dark.