Woodstage

Woodstage is a new commercial concept and entrepreneurial experiment. The project comes from the team behind the successful event concept, Woodstock of Eating, a festival that combines contemporary street eats with a line-up of music and arts performances. Through a number of these events, they have grown a vibrant community of young entrepreneurs and artists in Beijing. Woodstage takes the archetype of the festival and prototypes it across a more permanent venue. Joy City Mall is a large urban lifestyle complex anchoring the surrounding residential neighborhood. Woodstage takes up 1400 square meters of commercial space in the complex. Typically the real estate within a large urban shopping center is only accessible and affordable for mass-franchised, or mass-branded retail concepts. The social and entrepreneurial innovation of the Woodstage model was to create a flexible space that would act as both a platform and test-lab for small scale start-ups to trial new dining or retail concepts in commercial space. Small-scale vendors could sign contracts for six months — making the venue not only accessible, but ensuring it would feel dynamic by continually presenting new offerings. In this way a community of small local business owners were able to gain a foothold in an urban space typically reserved for well-established brands. 

The architecture of the space had to be unifying and yet hold room for enough variety and difference to maintain an ephemeral, festival atmosphere. Spatial / graphic systems to present each small brand’s own unique visual identity had to be devised to be flexible and able to be continually changed. The tactile brick materials and soft ceiling lines bring a warmth to the space and yet are durable for large crowds. The primary spatial feature is the music / performance stage that allows crowds to gather at the heart of the venue. For times when it is not in use or in semi-private use, curtains around allow it to be closed off or open up depending on time of day, event, and need. The retail area of the space needed display systems engineered to incorporate lighting and electricity, to hold graphics, and to display as well as store various products for retail vendors who would change often. The entire space had to have a clear identity and feel well-built and yet every element had to be flexible and transformable to accommodate different events and change within the day, week, month, or year. 

Woodstage visual identity by Meat Studio

Lighting Design by Ning Field Lighting Design