The Animal Backbone Retail Store

This architectural interior photograph presents a retail space characterized by dramatic structural concrete overhead and a contemporary glass pavilion below. Scanning from top to bottom, massive concrete beams and supports dominate the upper portion, their surfaces textured like rough stone with colors ranging from pale dove gray to deep slate, suggesting cool, weighty mass one might imagine as smooth yet granular to the touch. These monumental elements angle and intersect overhead like the vertebrae of an enormous creature, creating sheltering caves of shadow. Below this brutalist canopy, a glass-enclosed retail space occupies the middle ground, framed in black steel that creates clean geometric lines. The storefront features panels of perforated metal, silvery and catching light like metallic mesh, with countless small holes creating a dotted pattern across the surface. Within the glass entry vestibule at center, a dark cat stands in silhouette, small against the architectural scale, perhaps knee-height to a person. The floor extends forward as a polished surface with the dark, reflective quality of wet slate, mirroring the concrete masses above and the illuminated interior, creating a doubled world beneath one's feet. Circular openings in the metal screens, roughly doorway-sized, provide glimpses into the warmly lit interior beyond, where arched forms and additional perforated surfaces create layered depth. Light emanates from within the retail space, warm and inviting, while cooler ambient illumination fills the concrete zone above. The overall atmosphere suggests a cathedral-like quietude, the stillness of stone and metal, with the small living presence of the cat providing scale and unexpected warmth.

This once the first slaughterhouse in the Far East, where countless lives were got killed, it is fascinating but attracts a lot of tourists. Today, this building has become a famous cultural and creative industry center in Shanghai. Respecting the tens of thousands of animal souls, we are always looking for a way to have a commemorative architecture, trying to make an icy building to echo the concrete, and to arouse the painful memories and facts of killing animals because of lust.