The Root, an underground exhibition interior by Wutopia Lab in Xuhui, Shanghai, reorganizes a basement level into a top-lit spatial sequence defined by descent, compression, and geological materiality. Conceived as the underground component of The Seed, the project uses a stainless-steel, root-like ceiling, rough basalt walls, organic terrazzo flooring, and controlled daylight to establish a relationship between surface architecture and subterranean space.
The Root – The Seed Technical Information
- ArchitectsWutopia Lab
- LocationXuhui, Shanghai, China
- Gross Area864 m2 | 9,300 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2023 – 2026
- Photographs© Daily Architecture Photography | Liu Guowei
Space is not a container, but a constructed relationship. People dwell within it, light descends through it, and time becomes perceptible within it.
– Wutopia Lab
Descent as Spatial Narrative
The Root approaches the underground not as a residual basement condition, but as the primary site of architectural meaning. Located beneath The Seed in Shanghai’s Xuhui district, the interior develops a narrative of descent in which visitors move from the visible urban surface into a compressed and increasingly enclosed environment. The sequence relies on curved passages, warm stone tones, and calibrated lighting to slow perception before arrival in the central hall.
This spatial movement is tied to the project’s central metaphor of growth below ground. Rather than illustrating a seed or tree in literal terms, the design interprets germination as a hidden process: roots extend, matter accumulates, and light becomes scarce but decisive. The basement becomes a conceptual inversion of conventional exhibition planning, where the most significant spatial event occurs below grade rather than at the public-facing surface.
The above-ground pavilion and underground hall are organized through a vertical axis established by the skylight. This opening does more than introduce daylight. It marks the point where the ground plane is interrupted, allowing the exhibition space below to register the presence of the city above. In this sense, the oculus acts as both a connector and a threshold, turning the section into the project’s main organizational device.
Light, Structure, and the Root Ceiling
At the center of the underground hall, daylight enters through a circular skylight and falls onto a column-free room enclosed by dark basalt walls. The top-lit condition gives the space a clear orientation, replacing the lateral views typically associated with exhibition interiors with a vertical relationship between visitor, ceiling, and sky. The contrast between the brightness of the oculus and the weight of the perimeter walls intensifies the sense of being below ground.
The ceiling is formed from textured stainless steel elements woven into an abstract root system. Its value is not only symbolic. The structure integrates lighting, ventilation, sprinklers, smoke exhaust, and maintenance access, consolidating technical requirements into a single spatial field. This approach prevents building systems from appearing as secondary additions and instead makes them part of the architectural language of the room.
The strongest tension in the hall lies between the precise geometry of the skylight and the irregular network of the root ceiling. The oculus is engineered, circular, and legible; the surrounding metal lattice appears tangled, directional, and organic. This contrast avoids simple natural imitation. It frames growth as a condition shaped by structure, gravity, and infrastructure, rather than as a decorative motif applied to the ceiling surface.
Material Register of the Underground
The central hall is defined by rough-chiseled basalt, whose dark and uneven surface gives the perimeter a geological weight. The wall reads less as an enclosing partition than as an excavated boundary, reinforcing the idea of a carved interior. Thin vertical lights punctuate the basalt, emphasizing its texture while preventing the room from becoming visually inert.
Against this dense perimeter, the organic terrazzo floor introduces a lighter register. Its pale tone and fine aggregate pattern recall sediment or compressed organic matter, while its polished surface reflects the glow from the ceiling and skylight. The floor mediates between the darkness of the walls and the metallic complexity overhead, allowing the room to remain spatially legible despite its theatrical contrasts.
The approach corridors use warmer terracotta and travertine-toned surfaces, often grazed by concealed lighting that reveals horizontal striations in the stone. These passages suggest soil layers rather than finished walls, marking a gradual transition from the surface world into the darker central chamber. The material sequence is therefore sectional as well as atmospheric: light tones and stratified surfaces compress into basalt, metal, and top light.
Exhibition Space as a Designed Mode of Viewing
The circular, column-free hall positions visitors directly beneath the suspended root structure and orients them toward the skylight as a spatial center. The removal of internal columns and vertical circulation elements gives the room a continuous field, allowing exhibitions to occupy the space without competing with structural interruptions. Yet the architecture never becomes neutral. The ceiling, walls, and light establish a strong perceptual framework before any exhibit is installed.
This approach treats exhibition design as an active mode of viewing. Movement, scale, and material contrast shape how the visitor reads the room and, by extension, anything displayed within it. The descent into the hall produces a shift in attention from urban exteriority to interior concentration, while the overhead root system maintains awareness of the unseen ground above.
In relation to Wutopia Lab’s earlier work on Orbit, where spatial experience was organized through flow and continuous repositioning, The Root develops a more vertical and compressed logic. Here the visitor’s journey is structured by downward movement, enclosure, and eventual exposure to light from above. The exhibition space becomes a constructed condition of emergence, where perception is guided through the relationship between top light, geological mass, and an infrastructural ceiling that appears to grow through the section.
About Wutopia Lab
Wutopia Lab is a Shanghai-based architecture practice led by Chief Architect YU Ting, known for narrative-driven spaces and conceptually rich interiors. In its exhibition design work, the studio treats space as a designed mode of viewing, organizing Orbit through flow and The Seed through descent.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: Worked with Wutopia Lab to eliminate eight existing columns and create a column-free underground space.
- Client: Shanghai Yibin Real Estate Co., Ltd., commissioned by Hongkong Land.
- Interior development: AICO
- Lighting design: Gradient Lighting, Chloe ZHANG, and Yi HUANG
- Photography: Daily Architecture Photography, LIU Guowei
- Chief Architect: YU Ting
- Project architect: Liran SUN
- Design team: PAN Dali, KUANG Zhou, and Vi CHEN
- Research references or publications: Robert Macfarlane, Underland; 1847 Tree of Life illustration by Oluf Olufsen Bagge from the Icelandic Prose Edda.
