OMC Fashion CenterOMC时尚发布中心

Set on a corner of an apartment complex in the Huangdao Fashion Industrial Park in Qingdao, the OMC Fashion Center faces a tidal sea and extends Atelier Alter's earlier “Vertical Tides” project. The six-storey, 5,300 m² building opens its ground floor to the street for fashion launches and showrooms; the second floor connects to the apartment complex, and the four floors above are co-working space for designers.

Rather than placing a typical urban office block on the seafront, the design sets out to introduce a sense of freedom and break the predictable pattern. Starting from Le Corbusier's homogeneous Dom-ino frame and from a question at the heart of fashion — the relationship between fabric and body — it inserts a series of tangential and diverging curved surfaces: a huge spatial geometry that intervenes in, and interacts with, the uniform grid of slabs and columns.

Where the geometry touches the ground, the ground floor is left largely open for runway shows and presentations, beneath a four-storey shared atrium. Higher up, open offices, display stands and meeting areas cling to the curved surfaces and keep shifting, giving brands more room to show their work and designers more chances to meet. Horizontally against the slabs and vertically against the glass curtain wall, the form now touches, now pulls away — sliding from generous rooms into narrow, sharp gaps, or twisting from a tangential wall into a floor. Movement begins on the façade, glides inside and keeps changing in both directions, producing a strongly sculptural building by the sea.