Selecting Spatial Design Strategy For Wholesale Center In Response To Commercial Need

The Specialized Markets are an essential architectural form of commodity circulation in China. Since the reform and opening in 1978, there had been rapid growth in both productivity and commercial markets; and in response to the decline in retail demands in recent years, wholesale centers began to flourish. Through continuous improvements and innovation, wholesale centers are promoting social and economical development, satisfying household demands, expanding employment opportunities, and advancing international and domestic commodity circulations. But in the heat of the wholesale center boom, wholesale centers are not receiving the deserved attention in regards to architectural design. Presently, research in architectural planning and design regarding this form of commercial building is progressing rather slowly, and is unable to provide sufficient references and guidance to fastidious designs, leading to randomized development. Under the current pressure derived from the rapid growth of E-commerce, it is vital to systematically study wholesale center planning and design.The following study tries to analyze the dependency of commercial activities and occurrence of sales, on the adaptability of the commercial space in wholesale centers, based on analyzing architectural designs responding to particular needs in commercial space. Case studies show that although the location attractiveness does affect the level of commercial operations, it is dominated by the effects of commercial regularity of the wholesale center. This commercial regularity of the wholesale center manifests as its operations strategy. Therefore, this paper focused on investigating the relationship between the operations strategy and the architectural design of wholesale centers.This research is based on Evaluation of Built Environment (BEE) and Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE). POE involves systematic evaluation of opinions regarding buildings in use, from the perspective of the people who use them. It assesses how well buildings correlate to users’needs, and identifies ways to improve building design, performance and fitness for purpose. The goal of this paper is to identify the architectural design parameters and methods of wholesale centers that are influential to operations strategy, by chronologically examining the operations of existing wholesale centers and its surroundings, and performing comparative studies on similar cases.