Roarc Renew Turns an OMA Mirror Box in Shanghai into a Retail Space Built from Ropes, Zippers, and Tent Fabric

There is something audacious about taking a building already touched by OMA, the glass-and-mirror pavilion Rem Koolhaas planted inside Shanghai's Columbia Circle, and deciding the best way to activate it is not with conventional retail fit-out but with the literal material vocabulary of an outdoor sportswear brand. That is what Roarc Renew has done with Kolon Sport 1973, a brand culture center and social space for the Korean outdoor pioneer. The project sits at the heart of Columbia Circle's courtyard, flanked by heritage residential towers and mature trees, and reads from the outside as a luminous, cable-stayed glass box. Step inside and the logic shifts entirely: screws are replaced by garment buttons, mortise-and-tenon joints give way to zippers, and glue is swapped for rope binding. The building becomes, in effect, a piece of clothing turned inside out.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is not its novelty as a branded retail environment but the rigor with which Roarc Renew has pursued a single idea. Every connection system in the interior derives from garment construction. High-density nylon straps form A-shaped columns. Kolon's own tent fabric encloses a coffee area. Technological fabrics, breathable and translucent, serve as exhibition walls. The architects even built a 1:1 factory sample to load-test the tighteners used for tensioned rope structures, treating fashion hardware with the seriousness normally reserved for structural steel. The result is a space that communicates brand identity not through graphics or signage but through tectonic decisions.

The Glass Box in the Courtyard

Columbia Circle is one of Shanghai's most carefully curated mixed-use compounds, and OMA's earlier renovation established a series of glass pavilions that act as connective tissue between the neighborhood's older structures. The Kolon Sport pavilion inherits that language: a glazed envelope suspended beneath a translucent panel roof held aloft by tensile steel cables. At dusk the building glows from within, its cables silhouetted against the sky like guy-lines on a tent. The metaphor is not accidental. Roarc Renew treats the roof as a stretched canopy, pulling outdoor camping logic into permanent architecture.

From the courtyard, the pavilion sits comfortably between mature trees and the brick-clad residential towers that define Columbia Circle's character. The cable-supported sign above the entrance avoids the typical retail marquee; instead it reads as a structural element, a piece of rigging rather than decoration. The transparency of the facade encourages passersby to treat the interior as an extension of the public courtyard, collapsing the threshold between street life and brand experience.

Soft Joints: A Construction System Borrowed from Clothing

The concept Roarc Renew calls "soft joints" is the intellectual core of the project. Where conventional interiors rely on rigid mechanical fasteners, here the architects substitute garment hardware at every feasible point. Buttons fix panels in place. Zippers allow components to be separated and reconfigured. Ropes, arranged horizontally and vertically and pulled taut with pulleys and tighteners, create spatial divisions and structural frames. The white fabric-wrapped service counter on the ground floor exemplifies this approach: stretched cloth realizes a counter surface that a conventional fit-out would execute in stone or solid surface.

The green modular benches with timber slat surfaces and integrated metal planters extend the logic outdoors. They read as furniture but function more like base-camp equipment, portable and reconfigurable. It is a persuasive argument: if Kolon's fabrics can withstand alpine conditions, they can certainly hold up in a Shanghai retail interior. The rigor of the factory load-testing, where prototypes were subjected to long-duration stress to verify rope tension, gives the whimsy of the concept real structural credibility.

Raw Concrete and Orange Modules

Inside, the palette is deliberately raw. Exposed concrete ceilings, visible mechanical systems, and bare ductwork establish a backdrop that recalls the utilitarian honesty of a workshop or a warehouse. Against this neutral field, Roarc Renew deploys orange modular display units as the dominant color accent. The orange curved workbenches, the stacking display modules flanking the concrete staircase, and the suspended clothing racks all share the same saturated hue. It functions as a brand signifier but also as a wayfinding device, marking the zones where product meets customer.

The double-height atrium is the most spatially generous moment in the project. A concrete stair rises through the volume, connecting the ground-floor retail and exhibition tables to upper levels. A green platform, likely serving as a flexible event or display zone, anchors the lower level beneath the full height of exposed structure above. The decision to leave the mechanical systems visible rather than concealing them behind a finished ceiling reinforces the design concept: just as Kolon garments hide technological properties inside an understated shell, the building lets its own infrastructure remain legible.

Tent Fabric Coffee and Flexible Display

The retail floor operates less like a conventional shop and more like a curated exhibition. Rolling white display panels allow the plan to be reconfigured for different product launches or events. Modular white shelving units with wire mesh grids hold clothing and footwear alongside climbing plants, blurring the line between merchandise display and domestic shelf. A black steel spiral staircase, raw and industrial, threads through the space beneath exposed ductwork and concrete columns, providing a vertical connection that feels almost improvised, like a fire escape repurposed for daily use.

The tent-fabric coffee space, one of the project's signature gestures, turns Kolon's core product into architecture. Tent material, the same stuff designed to shelter hikers at altitude, is deployed as canopy and enclosure for a hospitality function within the retail environment. It is a bold literalism, but it works because the material genuinely performs: it is breathable, translucent, and easy to clean, qualities that make it as practical as a ceiling tile and far more evocative.

The Courtyard and Rooftop as Extended Territory

Roarc Renew extends the brand environment beyond the glass walls. A covered courtyard uses a translucent fabric canopy to shelter green bench seating and potted plants on gravel, creating a decompression zone between the street and the interior. The fabric overhead filters daylight and softens the boundary between indoors and out, an architectural move that mirrors the way technical outdoor fabrics manage weather and light.

On the roof, a timber-decked terrace with planted beds and a metal pergola becomes a genuine social space, not just a mechanical penthouse. Mesh screens with angled steel cable supports frame views of the surrounding neighborhood while pendant lights establish the terrace as usable after dark. The rooftop is the project's most generous public gesture: a place where the community can gather without any obligation to shop. For a brand culture center, that openness is the strongest statement of intent.

Why This Project Matters

Branded retail interiors usually communicate identity through surface: wall graphics, curated color palettes, logo placement. Kolon Sport 1973 does something structurally different. By substituting garment construction methods for conventional building joinery, Roarc Renew embeds the brand's values into the tectonic logic of the space itself. You do not need to read a label to understand that the building is about outdoor technology; you can feel it in the tension of a rope, the stretch of a fabric counter, the translucency of a tent-material wall. It is branding through construction, not decoration.

The project also demonstrates how a thoughtful interior intervention can reactivate an already significant piece of architecture. OMA's glass pavilion provided the shell; Roarc Renew filled it with a material culture that gives it new purpose and audience. In a retail landscape saturated with interchangeable white boxes and Instagrammable backdrops, a space that actually asks you to examine how things are joined together feels genuinely subversive. It suggests that the most compelling brand spaces are not the ones that look the most polished but the ones that let you see how they are made.

Kolon Sport 1973 by Roarc Renew, located in Columbia Circle, Shanghai, China. Original building renovation by OMA. Completed in 2023. Commercial retail and brand culture center. Photography by WenStudio and Arch-Exist Photography.

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