*북스토어 인테리어 [ Atelier Archmixing ] Yueyue Bookstore

Guoquan Road

Yueyue/Zhida bookstore is located at No.525 Guoquan road. The west part of the lushly shaded Guoquan road belongs to the urban area of Fudan University: to the north is the Handan road campus, surrounded by gymnasium, publishing offices, SEM, living areas of students, also kindergarten, primary school and high school that are affiliated to Fudan University.

Guoquan Road used to be famous as a place with lots of literature bookstores. With the rise of online bookstores, most bookstores on this road disappeared, just like all the other bookstores. In recent years, however, there has been a new trend to build bookstores, and mostly in the mode of "bookstore +". The consumption upgrade and the rise of lifestyle aesthetics in the city is the main motivator behind. In such an ordinary urban block as Guoquan Road, is it still possible to create a bookstore that is simple but with personality in both function and details? 

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Architects: Atelier Archmixing

Location: No. 525 Guoquan Road, Yangpu District, Shanghai, China

Lead Architects: Shen Zhuang, Hao Ren, Yu Tang, Jie Zhu

Area: 94.0 m2

Project Year: 2017

Photographs: Qingshan Wu

Two bookstores

ZOU Bin and LUO Hong run a successful online bookstore together.  Besides online store, they has been operating this bookstore on Guoquan Road for more than 10 years. Because of the market change as mentioned above, this bookstore had been under greater and greater pressure. Before renovation, it mainly sold supplementary books for students. The space had a limited height and a limited area; the plan had a cramped outline; even worse, the kitchen upstairs was always leaking.

This couple client both agreed to update and upgrade the store, but they had different ideas on the identity of the bookstore.  Zou wouldn't give up his interest in liberal arts; he wanted to run a bookstore focusing on literature, history and philosophy. While Luo was more pragmatic: considering the trend of the market, she would prefer to have a general bookstore, that could also hold activities such as off-line meet, parent-child activities, etc.  The designer thus proposed: why don't we build two bookstores?