The Puzzle Maze is a public space intervention designed to foster interactions, attract customers and enhance the experience in the privately-owned public space within an open-air Retail Street.
Project name: Puzzle Maze
Designer: 100architect
Design team: Marcial Jesus, Javier Gonzalez, Eunice Tsa
Client: Life Hub @ Daning, (Chongbang Group)
Location: Daning Road, Jin’An District, Shanghai, China
Built area: 228 m2
Height: 6 mts
Completion: June 2017
Photographer: Amey Kandalgaonkar
It is a gigantic puzzle designed as a beautiful walkable urban object to experience from inside. It is at the same time game and an urban object openly used.
Life Hub @ Daning, a 250,000 sqm mixed use development with 110,000 sqm shopping mall, is one of the hottest shopping centers in Shanghai, due to its condition of open-air retail street.
From the very beginning the marketing team of Life Hub @ Daning insisted on creating an INNOVATIVE kids’ playground.
Something unexpected beyond any typical playground. An intervention that, by itself, would turn one of their most dead pedestrian streets with poor pedestrian circulation into an attractive and busy “SPACE”,
where their customers could bring their kids and families and spend some quality time interacting with other kids and families, as well as reactivating the pedestrian circulation at that spot.
The pedestrian street to intervene was too narrow to be able to host any kind of activity involving kids while respecting the free & comfortable circulation of pedestrians.
Therefore, we decided to create a vertical playground, liberating space on the ground level to allow proper circulation along the corridor.
The resulting proposal was a vertical maze, in which the horizontal slabs would act as a ladder system helping kids to climb up & down.
