ATELIER TAO+C

A PRIVATE READING ROOM

Interior Photography by Wen Studio

Founded by architectural designers, Tao Liu and Chunyan Cai in 2016, atelier tao+c is an emerging design studio based in Shanghai. Their design experiments span from architecture, interior, products and teaching, paralleled with studio's continuous research on the restoration of old buildings and the domestic landscape in the living condition.

Atelier tao+c aspires to incorporate their architectural approach with interior design, and withdraws to the inner world, allowing the space to grow on its very own narrative, to blur the boundaries between the exterior and interior, to meticulously bridge the gap that we often neglect.

Their latest project, A Private Reading Room, is an internal reading room for a team, a shared study room among a group of friends and a third space between public and private, living and working.

On the ground floor of a 1980s house, there are two vacant rooms enclosed by load-bearing brick walls and next to a glasshouse in the courtyard. Atelier tao+c converted those three separated rooms into a united place where accommodates a dozen people to read together at the same time and suitable to hold small lectures within.

As a brick structure, each existing wall is immovable. After removing the original doors and windows, the rooms are connected to each other by three openings which are about 2-3 meters wide. The intervention responds such constraints with an open room composition, let the wall and the structural column dissolved in the visual perception by reorganising the circulation through the space. First, a set of bookshelves in semi-circular shape is introduced in and run through two brick rooms, the wall then is hidden behind to form two small quiet reading

corners inwards; outwards, as the wall disappears, and the bookshelves smoothly and effectively connects two rooms into one.

The remaining two groups of structural wall stacks standing in the middle of the doorways connected to the glasshouse, wrapped it with off-white travertine accordingly to the irregular shape and resolved it into an independent sculpture in the space. Then the formerly separated rooms are brought together and form a large flowing space.

Inside the shell of original glasshouse, a timber structure was inserted. The wooden beams and columns were integrated with the bookshelves. Two different shapes of skylight, round and square, are cut out on the newly made wooden ceiling to filter out excess sunlight and lead zenithal natural light to the centre of the rooms which are more pleasant for reading.

The three components integrate three units to a minimal, yet unique continuous space. Finally, in the 70 square-meter site, there are four different seating and corners encourage various reading gestures. Some small study table for single person to sit and work, a sofa seat suitable for multiple people to relax and talk, a shared meeting table, and a reading booth for one person to meditate inside.