After designing a striking Shanghai office for Canadian lifestyle brand Herschel Supply, Shanghai-based architecture and interior design practice Linehouse has outdone itself with a graphic and abstract pop-up structure for streetwear retail trade event YO’HOOD at the Shanghai Expo Centre.

Linehouse, established in 2013 by Chinese-Swedish Alex Mok and New Zealander Briar Hickling, likes to investigate the rituals of inhabitation. If there’s scope to transform a mundane experience into a transformative act (especially with a graphic sensibility), Linehouse will take it. 

The Herschel Supply pop-up demonstrated that impeccably. It was essentially a fragmented dwelling – a horizontally stacked timber structure that pushed and pulled visitors toward, into and through it with voids, colour and reflected light.

Drawing from Herschel Supply’s roots in Vancouver, an urban centre surrounded by nature, Linehouse took the notion of the urban forest and the type of dwelling that might be found there – and then deconstructed it.

The pop-up structure was essentially a stack of timber lengths arranged around a central void in the profile of a simple hut. Layered over and intertwined with the timber was a series of vertical mirror columns, translucent panels in wedge shapes, and black metal frames with acrylic that enclosed smaller display areas with two-tone story panels. 

The masterstroke was the introduction of gradient colour on just one side of the lengths of timber. The colour gradient developed up, down and across the stack spanning from blue and green to yellow and orange. 

The result was a masterful transformation of simple materials and components into an inhabitable composition with the power to alter one’s perception.

Photography by Dirk Weiblen.