MORE OFFICE RENOVATION BY TAOA ARCHITECTS: TRANSFORMING AN INDUSTRIAL WAREHOUSE INTO CREATIVE OFFICES IN BEIJING

In Beijing, TAOA Architects has transformed a former 1960's textile warehouse at Langyuan Station into an innovative headquarters for MORE, one of China’s leading visual effects studios. Blending industrial heritage, collaborative workspaces, and contemporary architecture, the project demonstrates an exemplary approach to adaptive reuse and urban regeneration within one of the capital’s most dynamic creative districts.

MORE Office Renovation: An Industrial Adaptive Reuse Project by TAOA Architects

Located within Langyuan Station, a former textile warehouse complex in Beijing, the MORE Office Renovation by TAOA Architects reimagines an industrial relic as a contemporary workplace for the creative industry. Once a manufacturing site built in the 1960's, Langyuan Station has evolved into a thriving cultural and creative hub where traces of industrial history coexist with new forms of production, innovation, and urban life.

As MORE, one of China's most prominent visual effects production companies, continued to grow, the need for a larger and more inspiring workplace became increasingly important. The company selected an entire red-brick warehouse within the complex as its new headquarters, offering an opportunity to create a unique work environment while preserving the site's industrial character.

Langyuan Station: From Industrial Heritage to Creative District

Before the renovation, the warehouse had already undergone a preliminary transformation. The park's management had inserted three standard floors supported by a steel-frame structure while retaining the original red-brick exterior walls. The building's generous scale, deep floor plates, dense column grid, and preserved industrial envelope established the conditions that would define the architectural intervention.

Rather than viewing these existing elements as constraints, TAOA Architects embraced them as opportunities to generate a new spatial identity. The project seeks to establish a dialogue between the building's industrial past and its contemporary use, creating a workplace that feels both rooted in history and oriented toward the future.

Designing a Workplace for Creativity and Collaboration

Film and visual effects production require not only technical expertise but also constant collaboration and creative exchange. Accommodating approximately 400 employees, MORE envisioned a workplace that would foster intellectual freedom, comfort, and informal interaction.

Working within a relatively modest construction budget, TAOA Architects developed the project around three key considerations: the existing industrial structure, the company's operational culture, and the use of cost-effective yet expressive materials.

From the outset, the design focused on how people move, work, meet, and experience the building throughout the day. The objective was not simply to create office space but to shape an environment capable of supporting creativity and collective production.

An Open Spatial Organization That Encourages Interaction

The building's deep floor plates and dense structural grid presented a significant challenge. To overcome these limitations, the architects organized the program into two complementary spatial typologies: enclosed volumes and open spaces.

Functions requiring privacy or technical isolation, including meeting rooms, the motion-capture studio, screening room, finance offices, administrative departments, and restrooms, were consolidated into independent enclosed volumes. Meanwhile, workstations, dining areas, lounges, and informal gathering spaces were kept entirely open.

This strategy liberated the floor plates from the rigidity of the existing column grid and allowed the interior to function as a fluid and interconnected workplace. Rather than defining circulation through corridors, movement emerges naturally between the different programmatic elements.

Independent Volumes Within a Flexible Landscape

The enclosed spaces appear as distinct architectural objects distributed throughout the building. Some are luminous volumes wrapped in translucent polycarbonate panels, while others are constructed from plywood and glass, creating a warmer and more tactile atmosphere.

These freestanding elements were positioned according to functional needs, leaving the remaining areas as large, continuous open spaces. This approach generates a rich spatial landscape where different scales of interaction coexist.

Viewed from above, the organization resembles an exploding firework. The central atrium acts as the core, while workspaces and enclosed volumes radiate outward like sparks. This arrangement provides a clear overall structure while offering users a varied and dynamic experience on a daily basis.

Metal Mesh as a Defining Architectural Element

One of the project's most distinctive features is the extensive use of metal mesh. Rather than serving merely as a finishing material, the mesh becomes a fundamental architectural tool for defining relationships between spaces.

With varying levels of transparency, the material creates boundaries without fully separating environments. It allows visual connections, light penetration, and spatial continuity while simultaneously establishing distinct zones and atmospheres.

The resulting layers of transparency generate a sense of depth and complexity throughout the office. Spaces remain connected and interactive, reinforcing the collaborative culture that defines MORE's working environment.

The strategy of organizing spaces around a central core while allowing them to expand freely outward reflects the balance between operational efficiency and creative freedom that characterizes the company.

Reinterpreting the Historic Red-Brick Façade

The original red-brick walls remain one of the building's most significant historical elements. Rather than preserving them as a static backdrop or concealing them behind a new skin, TAOA Architects sought to reintegrate them into the building's contemporary life.

New openings were carefully introduced to meet the functional requirements of the interior and improve daylight access. To unify these interventions, the architects wrapped the entire façade in a secondary layer of industrial metal mesh.

This new envelope incorporates the historic brick walls, newly inserted glazing, external fire stairs, and planted areas into a single architectural system. Between the original façade and the mesh, an interstitial space was created to accommodate vegetation, circulation, and technical infrastructure.

A Dynamic Façade Defined by Light and Transparency

The metal mesh creates a soft and constantly changing boundary around the building. Depending on the time of day, viewing angle, and weather conditions, the perception of transparency, shadow, and depth continuously evolves.

The new façade simultaneously reveals and conceals the layers behind it. The original brick walls, vegetation, and circulation elements remain visible through the mesh, creating a subtle dialogue between permanence and transformation.

This interplay gives the building a dual character. Its physical presence is strong and unified, yet its appearance remains light, porous, and ever-changing.

Industrial Heritage Reimagined for Contemporary Use

The renovation does not seek to celebrate the old building through contrast alone, nor does it transform history into a purely symbolic artifact. Instead, the project allows the former warehouse to re-enter everyday life through active use.

The value of the industrial structure emerges through its continued occupation. Red brick walls, structural columns, metal mesh, skylights, staircases, and human activity become interconnected elements within a new architectural ecosystem.

By establishing new relationships between these components, the project demonstrates how industrial heritage can remain relevant without losing its authenticity. The building becomes a framework capable of accommodating evolving forms of work while preserving the memory embedded in its materials and spaces.

A Model for Urban Regeneration in Beijing

MORE Office Renovation by TAOA Architects represents more than the transformation of a single building. It reflects a broader vision of urban regeneration in which industrial heritage becomes a catalyst for cultural and economic renewal.

By creating a workplace that is simultaneously relaxed, contemporary, and historically grounded, the project contributes to the ongoing evolution of Langyuan Station as one of Beijing's leading creative districts.

Rather than positioning old and new in opposition, the design establishes a coherent architectural language where history, industry, creativity, and everyday life overlap. The result is a workplace that responds to the needs of a modern creative company while preserving the identity of a site shaped by decades of industrial history.
 

Project Name: MORE Office Renovation
Location: Langyuan Station, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China

Architecture: TAOA Architects (Taoarchitecture) - i-taoa.com

Principal Architect: Tao Lei
Client: MORE (Visual Effects Production Company)
Project Type: Office Renovation / Adaptive Reuse / Interior Architecture
Program: Creative Headquarters & Workplace
Design Scope: Architecture, Interior Design, Landscape, Soft Furnishing
Design Year: 2024
Completion Year: 2025
Site Area: 2,102 m²
Gross Floor Area: 5,565 m²

Photography: (c) TAOA

The metal mesh envelope developed by TAOA Architects for MORE Office Renovation resonates with a broader lineage of architectural projects that use secondary skins not merely as façades, but as mediating layers between history, function, and perception. A similar approach can be found in SO–IL's Kukje Art Center in Seoul, where a stainless-steel chainmail veil wraps the gallery volume, softening its presence within the historic urban fabric while producing constantly shifting effects of light, transparency, and depth.

Likewise, Olivier Palatre Architectes' Étoile Cinémas Béthune employs a metallic envelope to transform the perception of a contemporary cultural building, creating an intermediate layer that simultaneously unifies the architecture and enriches its urban presence.

In Carmody Groarke's Hill House Box, the mesh becomes a conservation device at an architectural scale, enclosing and protecting Charles Rennie Mackintosh's Hill House while preserving its visibility and public accessibility. Extending this exploration beyond architecture into the realm of spatial installation, Edoardo Tresoldi's *Simbiosi* at Arte Sella in Italy's Trentino Valley transforms metal mesh into architecture itself. Neither building nor sculpture, the translucent structure uses wire mesh and local stone to create a suspended ruin that blurs the boundaries between presence and absence, matter and memory, landscape and construction.

Across these diverse projects, the mesh envelope evolves from a simple material solution into a powerful architectural instrument, a filter, a threshold, and a space of mediation capable of negotiating between preservation and transformation, permanence and change. Together, they reveal a contemporary architectural sensibility in which buildings increasingly operate through layers, atmospheres, and degrees of transparency rather than through singular and autonomous forms.