The newly renovated factory, owned by Weida Steel Industries, is located at Sejingkat Industry Park, Kuching, and the factory stands out with vivid clarity as a landmark from a distance, surrounded by the humble surroundings of an industrial area.
Refurbished to include a lively colour scheme and contemporary screen envelope composition, the newly refreshed building design is meant to enliven the streetscape and form an industrial context for its surroundings.
It was the client’s brief to renovate the abandoned furniture factory with a white classical facade and turn it into a modern showroom and office for a mild steel concrete lined pipes manufacturing company. The plan was to renovate the front facade in order to give it a more contemporary identity facing the main road. It would create a fresher look to the surroundings, and create a new branding identity for an enhanced corporate image.
There are a few alterations that have been made to the layout. A three-storey main office block at the front offers a number of facilities on the ground floor, including a lobby, a product gallery, conference rooms, an office, a utility room, and amenities. There are more office spaces and a conference room on the upper floors of the building. The mild steel concrete lined pipes manufacturing area is located behind the main office block.
The original facade of the building was symmetrical, with classical ornamentation adorning the exterior. As part of our design strategy, we introduced a screen envelope that encloses the factory to break down its symmetrical and solid appearance. Despite the fact that screen envelopes are not something new when integrated appropriately into a building, they can provide a radical response to contemporary design strategy.It is important for the screen envelope to serve a purpose beyond just being decorative. As well as being functional, it also provides privacy, ventilation and filtered daylight as well as a sense of privacy. It also serves to create a connection between the inside and outside.
The pattern on the new screen envelope oscillates between an organic design and a geometric design as a whole. More significantly, it is light and contemporary, in contrast to the previous heavy classical image.Most of the walls in the office were replaced with large glass panels during construction in order to bring in daylight and enhance transparency. The existing building is muted with a darker tone to become the ‘backdrop’ to the new screen envelope.
Additionally, to take into account the availability of construction materials, the length of time and the cost of the project, the façade envelope was also designed and detailed with the intention of highlighting the client’s steel industry business. It involves the innovative use of standard industrial components with creative details to create a modern design that is both innovative and cost-effective.
The design of the screen envelope has been influenced by geometrical patterns adapted from the corporate logo of the business. The two-dimensional logo was transformed into a three-dimensional screen envelope through the anatomy of facade components that were placed in layers to create a distinctive look.
The repetition of geometry and its composition – stretching, folding, peeling in order to reveal the programs behind the screen; define the entrance as well as improve the spatial experience, mediating the relationship between the inside and outside. With this design methodology, the screen envelope takes on different roles and enhances the scenographic experience, where the building facade is ‘animated’ with movement along the main road.
