MAD Architects bring Roca’s clean living to Beijing

(Image credit: Action Media)

last updated 28 October 2022

The contemporary ideal when it comes to bathrooms is a sterile sanctuary, stripped down to its essentials yet luxurious enough to draw you in for hours. Roca, the Barcelona-based bathroom outfitter that’s been at it for a hundred years, gets it, owns it and wants everybody to know it.

To that end the company has unlocked the secret to getting bums on seats: take what could be a run-of-the-mill showroom and elevate it into a gallery. After launching successful galleries in London, Lisbon, Spain and Shanghai, Roca has now opened its sixth in the Dongzhimen area of Beijing. And though it deviates dramatically from those spaces, it also remains spectacularly on message.

To design the 800 sq m interior Roca chose Ma Yansong, whose Beijing practice MAD specialises in organic, almost supernatural silhouettes that appear to pulsate with movement. Working within the strict confines of an existing building off congested Dongzhimen Outer Street, Yansong instead used light and projection to play with perceptions.

new gallery for Roca in Beijing — *Double height glazing opens up the gallery space to the urban environment so the LED screen becomes a facade to the street*

Taking advantage of full-height windows on two floors overlooking the busy pavement, he transformed the back wall into a giant LED screen, directing attention right through the building. The images on the screen, commissioned from art critic and curator Jérôme Sans, are eerily real: a mother bathing her baby, a man shaving his beard, a father tending to his young son, all tinkering with the latest Roca fixtures, seemingly oblivious to any spectators regardless of the constant flow of spectators on the street. It’s disarmingly alluring.

Yansong says he hopes the gallery ‘can become a positive, vivid corner of the urban community, connecting people and the city in the simplest way’. Elsewhere, projections of falling water that illuminate voids in the walls seek to calm them too.

It’s a deft bit of performance art amid the gallery’s backlit tile floors, stark pedestal displays and ominous black walls. It may not translate into concrete sales, but it advances the ideal of the contemporary bathroom that Roca has conceived immaculately.

An LED screen in the interior lights up with images of people

Architect Ma Yansong experimented with light floor tiles and LED lights to create a performative and artistic environment

INFORMATION

For more information, visit the MAD Architects website

Based in London, Ellen Himelfarb travels widely for her reports on architecture and design. Her words appear in The Times, The Telegraph, The World of Interiors, and The Globe and Mail in her native Canada. She has worked with Wallpaper* since 2006.

Wallpaper* Newsletter