Francesco Gatti is an Italian architect living in Shanghai with a fresh approach

1. SHANG-HIGHby Damiano Fossati
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2. From 2002, once he had opened his office in Rome, Francesco Gatti
was on his own, and things got even more challenging when he decided
to start his firm 3Gatti in Shanghai city centre in 2004. He marks his
territory with various and diversified approaches to design and with the
3 different interior design projects illustrated here, he shows how a good
concept is a necessary step for a ‘winning’ project.
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4. RedObject is a duplex office with an intriguing red
meeting-room feature running between two floors,
Zebar a club mocking the stripes of a zebra with an
inviting plaster/asphalt cutting-edge interior, and his
last project Alter with a stair design that runs across
main windows, floor, walls and ceiling, defining a slick
as well as cosy shop interior for new European fashion
brands that land for the first time in China.
‘China is a place that gives you a lot of opportuni-
ties,’ says Francesco Gatti. But the conditions are very
different from in his home country. ‘In Italy you should
be able to attend a meeting and be good in relationships,
but since my attitude isn’t diplomatic enough here in
China, I have a translator. Our communication is indirect
and they are not going to understand what I’m saying.
So what is going to talk, is the project itself. I have
patrons that give me a blank canvas to do what I know
to do, but sometimes they aren’t that open to innovation
and it is seen only in a really superficial way. They are
looking for seemingly modern projects but in reality
are 50 years obsolete and just want a huge amount of
glass and iron and shining materials or Roman arched
forms and capitals that are completely eclectic and
anachronistic.’
One of his first projects was the Red Object, which
involved inserting two mezzanine levels, coating much
of the concrete interior in white resin, and installing
a black reception desk and workbench around the
stairwell. ‘Red and black are historically avant-garde
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5. colours. These were the colours that represented a
certain turbulence or tension towards the essence of
objects whereas white represented a vacuum or void
in which to collocate their significance or meaning,’ he
says. ‘A blank sheet of paper on which nothing has yet
been written is white; once there is a text, the colour
red is used to underline words.’
Taking into account the height of the rooms, he
decided to divide the upper space into two mezzanine
floors joined together by two bridge-corridors. In this
way a neutral central void was created. Francesco
explains: ‘The use of white resin for the floors and
epoxy applied directly onto the concrete makes the
double height a perfect setting for the utility functions,
all housed among objects resembling sculptures. A
faceted red object contains two meeting rooms and a
kitchen in its lower level; it’s separated from the floor
by an illuminated slice of void and it reflects into the
white resin.’
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7. but completely alternative to the main global brands
accepted by the modern rich Chinese shoppers. The
philosophy of Alter, as the word says, is to be and
inspire an alternative world, so as a designer I thought
about an alternative architectural space like the ones
in the drawings of Escher, where gravity and the
The Zebar project was born in 2006 when a Sin-
gaporean movie director and an ex-musician from the
south of China decided to open a live bar in Shanghai:
‘The budget was very low but the client was incredibly
good and open-minded to us. The schedule, too, was
especially tight but fortunately they immediately liked
one of the first concepts I proposed to them: a caved
space formed from a digital Boolean subtraction of
hundreds of slices from an amorphic blob. The space
was subdivided into slices to bring it back from the
digital into the real world.’
In Europe the natural consequence of this kind of
design would have been to give the digital model to the
factory and, thanks to the computers, machines could
easily cut the huge amount of sections all different from
each other. ‘But we were in China where the work of
machines is replaced by the work of low paid humans.
Using a projector they placed all the sections we drew
on the plasterboards and then cut each of them by
hand. The cost was surprisingly low and the plan and
the construction were incredibly fast so the Zebar was
almost finished in a couple of months.’
Alter is a project for an alternative fashion store.
Here, he worked closely with Sonja Long, the owner,
about her vision out of the main stream, a vision
about inverted values, alternative beauties and sub-
verted point of views. ‘Sonja was crazy and brave
enough to propose to her customers a new model
of high-end fashion store with top-quality products
rules of the normal world don’t exist anymore, where
there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’, no ‘left’ or ‘right’, and
where everything is possible. The stairs become an
independent element capable to wrap the space or
to fold like paper creating impossible environments,’
explains Francesco Gatti. n
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