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SHANG-HIGHby DAmIANo FoSSAtI

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From 2002, once he had opened his office in Rome, Francesco Gatti

was on his own, and things got even more challenging when he decided

to start his firm 3Gatti in Shanghai city centre in 2004. He marks his

territory with various and diversified approaches to design and with the3 different interior design projects illustrated here, he shows how a good

concept is a necessary step for a winning project.

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Red Objectis a duplex oce with an intriguing redmeeting-room eature running between two foors,

Zebar a club mocking the stripes o a zebra with an

inviting plaster/asphalt cutting-edge interior, and his

last project Alter with a stair design that runs across

main windows, foor, walls and ceiling, dening a slickas well as cosy shop interior or new European ashion

brands that land or the rst time in China.

China is a place that gives you a lot o opportuni-

ties, says Francesco Gatti. But the conditions are very

dierent rom in his home country. In Italy you should

be able to attend a meeting and be good in relationships,

but since my attitude isnt diplomatic enough here in

China, I have a translator. Our communication is indirect

and they are not going to understand what Im saying.

So what is going to talk, is the project itsel. I havepatrons that give me a blank canvas to do what I know

to do, but sometimes they arent that open to innovation

and it is seen only in a really supercial way. They are

looking or seemingly modern projects but in reality

are 50 years obsolete and just want a huge amount o

glass and iron and shining materials or Roman arched

orms and capitals that are completely eclectic and

anachronistic.

One o his rst projects was the Red Object, which

involved inserting two mezzanine levels, coating much

o the concrete interior in white resin, and installing

a black reception desk and workbench around the

stairwell. Red and black are historically avant-garde

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colours. These were the colours that represented a

certain turbulence or tension towards the essence o

objects whereas white represented a vacuum or void

in which to collocate their signicance or meaning, he

says. A blank sheet o paper on which nothing has yetbeen written is white; once there is a text, the colour

red is used to underline words.

Taking into account the height o the rooms, he

decided to divide the upper space into two mezzanine

foors joined together by two bridge-corridors. In this

way a neutral central void was created. Francesco

explains: The use o white resin or the foors and

epoxy applied directly onto the concrete makes the

double height a perfect setting for the utility functions,

all housed among objects resembling sculptures. Aaceted red object contains two meeting rooms and a

kitchen in its lower level; its separated rom the foor

by an illuminated slice o void and it refects into the

white resin.

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but completely alternative to the main global brands

accepted by the modern rich Chinese shoppers. The

philosophy o Alter, as the word says, is to be and

inspire an alternative world, so as a designer I thought

about an alternative architectural space like the ones

in the drawings o Escher, where gravity and the

The Zebarproject was born in 2006 when a Sin-

gaporean movie director and an ex-musician rom the

south o China decided to open a live bar in Shanghai:

The budget was very low but the client was incredibly

good and open-minded to us. The schedule, too, was

especially tight but ortunately they immediately liked

one o the rst concepts I proposed to them: a caved

space ormed rom a digital Boolean subtraction o

hundreds o slices rom an amorphic blob. The space

was subdivided into slices to bring it back rom the

digital into the real world.

In Europe the natural consequence o this kind o

design would have been to give the digital model to the

actory and, thanks to the computers, machines could

easily cut the huge amount of sections all dif ferent fromeach other. But we were in China where the work o

machines is replaced by the work o low paid humans.

Using a projector they placed all the sections we drew

on the plasterboards and then cut each o them by

hand. The cost was surprisingly low and the plan and

the construction were incredibly ast so the Zebar was

almost nished in a couple o months.

Alter is a project for an alternative fashion store.

Here, he worked closely with Sonja Long, the owner,

about her vision out o the main stream, a visionabout inverted values, alternative beauties and sub-

verted point o views. Sonja was crazy and brave

enough to propose to her customers a new model

o high-end ashion store with top-quality products

rules of the normal world dont exist anymore, where

there is no up or down, no let or right, and

where everything is possible. The stairs b ecome an

independent element capable to wrap the space or

to fold like paper creating impossible environment s,

explains Francesco Gatti. n

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