The Seed (Underground) by Wutopia Lab is an interior exhibition space completed for Hongkong Land’s West Bund Central project in Xuhui, Shanghai, on April 30, 2026. Designed by Yu Ting and his team, the project transforms the lower level of The Seed into The Root, a spatial sequence where light, structure and material create a connection between the visible city above and the buried space below.
The Seed (Underground) by Wutopia Lab connects light and buried space in Shanghai
The Seed (Underground) by Wutopia Lab is an interior exhibition space completed for Hongkong Land’s West Bund Central project in Xuhui, Shanghai, on April 30, 2026. Designed by Yu Ting and his team, the project transforms the lower level of The Seed into The Root, a spatial sequence where light, structure and material create a connection between the visible city above and the buried space below.
The project began from a specific architectural problem. The overall scheme of The Seed had already been largely defined when Wutopia Lab was invited, but the exhibition space lacked a narrative capable of linking the ground floor with the underground level. The studio responded by drawing on the metaphor of the seed, a reference strengthened by the site’s history in Xuhui, where Xu Guangqi is associated with the origins of modern Chinese civilization in the early seventeenth century.
Rather than using the image of a tree literally, Wutopia Lab abstracted the structure of growth into a relationship between seed, root, soil and time. The underground level becomes a cave-like environment, not as a natural imitation, but as a spatial language of incubation and formation. Roots appear to extend downward from the ground plane, passing through the structure before anchoring into the underground space. Light enters from above and becomes the element that organizes direction, atmosphere and perception.
The design process was also defined by subtraction. Wutopia Lab removed the internal elevator and staircase, worked with structural engineers to eliminate eight existing columns, and created a complete column-free exhibition hall. A side glass curtain wall was closed, while a descending corridor was introduced to reduce and control light as visitors move downward. At the centre of the ground floor, a skylight allows natural light to pass into the underground, establishing a vertical connection between the two levels.
The Root’s overhead system is formed from textured stainless steel, woven into a root-like structure that integrates smoke exhaust, sprinklers, HVAC, lighting and maintenance access. This technical ceiling becomes the main spatial gesture of the project, turning infrastructure into atmosphere. Below it, rough-chiseled basalt walls define the central exhibition hall, while an organic terrazzo floor refers to the sedimentation of fallen leaves. Stone, steel and light work together to suggest erosion, pressure and time.
For Wutopia Lab, The Seed Underground operates as more than a neutral exhibition interior. It is a designed mode of viewing, where visitors experience descent as part of the project’s meaning. In the studio’s earlier project Orbit, movement was organized through flow; here, it is shaped through the movement downward. The root becomes a path between above and below, while the cave creates a condition in which hidden growth can be felt rather than illustrated.
The Root gives The Seed a narrative centre within Shanghai’s West Bund Central development. It frames the underground not as a secondary level, but as the place where transformation begins. Through structural removal, controlled daylight, stainless steel roots and mineral surfaces, Wutopia Lab turns an exhibition space into an architectural meditation on growth, time and the unseen conditions that make visible culture possible.
Photography by Guowei Liu, with courtesy of Wutopia Lab, shared with permission
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