In Rui’an’s Mayu Town, an area long defined by its prominence in China’s eyewear manufacturing sector, the Fang Eyewear Showroom emerges as a calculated departure from conventional retail spaces. Designed by M-D DESIGN STUDIO, the project is situated at the intersection of urban regeneration and commercial reinvention. Rather than simply updating a showroom typology, the architects pursue a broader spatial proposition: that retail architecture can function as civic art, mediating between commerce, culture, and context.
Fang Eyewear Showroom Technical Information
- Architects1-6: M-D DESIGN STUDIO
- Location: Mayu Town, Rui’an, Wenzhou, Zhejiang, China
- Area: 1,300 m2 | 13,990 Sq. Ft.
- Completion Year: 2025
- Photographs: © Yu Sunping, © Xie Shuxiang, © Qu Wenhao, © Wu Qiyan
We envisioned the showroom not as a commercial interior, but as a spatial narrative where light, geometry, and movement transform retail into an urban cultural landmark.
– Jizhong Wu, Lead Designer, M-D DESIGN STUDIO
Fang Eyewear Showroom Photographs
Rethinking the Showroom Typology in an Industrial Context
The decline of industrial manufacturing in many Chinese cities has prompted a wave of adaptive transformations. Mayu Town, while historically linked to the eyewear industry, is currently navigating shifting economic and spatial paradigms. Against this backdrop, M-D DESIGN STUDIO conceives the Fang Eyewear Showroom not as a product-focused interior, but as an urban artifact. One that reclaims relevance for post-industrial architecture by embedding narrative, spatial generosity, and layered symbolism.
The design approach intentionally distances itself from formulaic commercial strategies. Instead, the showroom is reconceived as a multi-sensory spatial sequence—integrating exhibition, hospitality, and literary functions. The programmatic hybridization reflects a changing attitude toward retail spaces: from transactional enclosures to public-oriented, experience-driven environments. Here, architecture is tasked with articulating a new form of urban memory.
Light as Structure: Geometric Narratives and Spatial Flow
Central to the design is a rigorous investigation of form and light. The architects draw from astronomical theories and traditional Indian symbolism, where the triangle represents spiritual creation and the unfolding of the future. This conceptual geometry is rendered spatially through the deployment of 45° light angles, which inform both the lighting scheme and the overall compositional logic.
The resultant interior is defined by staggered geometric forms that play with both directionality and depth. The concept of “gaze” becomes architectural: each line of sight is carefully framed, interrupted, or extended by the configuration of walls, ceilings, and voids. Sunlight is treated not as a passive entry but as an agent of transformation, refracted through folded surfaces to produce ephemeral effects. As the day progresses, the space comes alive. A choreography of shifting shadows and reflections that alters perception and provokes a heightened sense of spatial awareness.
This interplay of geometry and light is not decorative. It structures the visitor’s movement through the space, drawing them from the reception into an expansive atrium and beyond. Each shift in light, each shadow cast, reveals new alignments and associations; underscoring the project’s underlying ambition: to explore how spatial perception can be recalibrated through elemental design strategies.
Fang Eyewear Showroom Material Palette
Material choices in the Fang Eyewear Showroom are marked by restraint and intention. Rather than relying on surface ornament, the architects use a cohesive palette, primarily eco-friendly artistic paint, terrazzo, and stainless steel, to achieve continuity and modulation. Walls, ceilings, and floors are unified in a warm-white tone that diffuses light and softens spatial transitions. Within this muted canvas, subtle red accents and embedded membrane lighting introduce moments of contrast and rhythm.
The tactile language of the showroom is one of tension and balance. Terrazzo’s granular texture contrasts with the smooth reflectivity of stainless steel, while the concealed lighting system animates these surfaces with precision. The showroom, café, and art bookstore are not spatially isolated but are interconnected through open planning and fluid thresholds. This continuity allows the architecture to dissolve boundaries between spaces, between users, and between commercial and cultural functions.
By embedding materiality within a spatial narrative, M-D DESIGN STUDIO avoids spectacle and instead achieves atmospheric depth. The showroom feels both deliberate and open-ended: an environment designed for both occupation and reflection, rather than display.
Commercial Space as Urban Cultural Artifact
Perhaps the most compelling dimension of the project lies in its reframing of the showroom as a contributor to urban culture. The exterior landscape resists decorative formalism in favor of abstract geometries that extend the interior logic outward. Undulating ground planes and planar glass façades challenge conventional demarcations between interior and city, while simultaneously echoing the structural rhythms within.
This spatial porosity situates the showroom not as a closed commercial entity but as part of a larger urban continuum. The “Light Museum” concept, implicitly referenced throughout the project, acts as both a metaphor and a framework. It speaks to the role of light in organizing space and to the broader aim of transforming the showroom into a platform for civic engagement.
Fang Eyewear Showroom Plans
Fang Eyewear Showroom Image Gallery
About M-D DESIGN STUDIO
Founded in 2013 in Wenzhou, M-D DESIGN STUDIO operates across architecture, landscape, and visual arts. The studio is known for its human-centered and media-integrated approach to spatial design, shaping work that resonates with the cultural, urban, and environmental layers of the contemporary city.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Lead Designer: Jizhong Wu
- Chief Designer: Yangling Ye
- Client: Fang Eyewear (Fang’s Glasses, founded in 1992)
- Primary Materials: Artistic Paint, Terrazzo, Stainless Steel
- Landscape Construction: Shanghai Dio Landscape Engineering & Design Co., Ltd.
- Landscape Area: 1,700 m²
