At present, urban living and the future of big cities the world over are being challenged, but the concept of community is more potent than ever. Since COVID-19’s world tour, we’ve been forced to reexamine our relationship to our homes, public space, and communities. With the Bridge House, AIM’s second project with Cohost and Trust bridge located in the heart of tech district Zhangjiang, we’re redefining co-living for a new world.
Now, room size or square footage is second to the personality of a space. Distinctive places with personal touches and deep cultural context are the norms.
At AIM, a foundational piece of our ethos is building for a better community. We believe that good design cultivates strong connections. Rather than thinking of shared living space or co-living as a necessity, we interpreted it as an opportunity. With the Bridge House by Cohost, sharing space isn’t just a practical choice, it’s a bold one, where inhabitants can share values and ideas - and a kitchen.
Connecting Rooms
Isn’t the best possible connection of rooms the very base of architecture? Yet, in its conventional sense ‘Rooms’ tend to be more stand-alone than live together. This project hopes to disagree.
We designed a succession of interconnected rooms that open up to one another, like a conversation between spaces, the personalities that inhabit them, and their individual purposes. Standing in the green lounge, you can gaze into the red playroom and see the yellow study area just beyond it. These monochromatic spaces talk refinement and originality，celebrate their purposes with strong patterns and bold furniture.
Intimacy vs Openness
The experience of the space expands through striped wooden doors that can compartmentalize charming communal areas, with details that wink at Shanghai’s Art Deco history. Polished cement walls and floors provide unity and maturity.
For some, shared space might conjur up a cookie-cutter dorm and cramped quarters. Bridge House, with its generous 4.5 m high ceilings, duplex apartments, and abundance of light and space, invites you to reconsider. Each apartment room has a beautiful internal void at the window to capture natural light and maximize space.
Most importantly, the Bridge House is built to last and built to live in. Designed for all the messy, vibrant, peaceful, shared, and private moments that make up a life, we chose elements that are rooted in the reality of its future inhabitants. Here, communal living reaches beyond simply sharing space to realize a powerful, built-in sense of interconnectedness.
