On April 19th, the upscale salon event themed on “Eyes On Copenhagen - 8-hour Happiness" was hosted jointly by MATSU and YoungBird at the MATSU Shanghai Flagship Showroom. The event featured ten veteran design professionals who gathered together to explore the subject of "happy work".

"CELLS" of Happy Work

Since its inception in 1996, MATSU has been dedicated to becoming an upscale Chinese office furniture brand. Nowadays MATSU has built an international reputation with its visionary, quality space solutions. With a vision for increasing workplace efficiency and happiness, MATSU has lately presented a new premium office furniture collection named “Copenhagen” in partnership with the celebrated Belgian designer Dirk Wynants. 

"BLOOD VESSELS" of Happy Work

The event also featured Mr. Wu Gang, founding principal and chairman of WSP Architects, which is known for a series of remarkable corporate-headquarters projects, like the Hangzhou Alipay Building and the Hi-tech Park in Beijing. As keynote speaker, Mr. Wu first talked about what "healthy workplace" means and then offered solutions to today's working environment problems in terms of sustainability, dynamism, natural lighting, staff creativity and natural environment - all conceived to make employees work more happily.

Mr. Wu Gang has shared his experience about working environment in his childhood, by looking back to the changings of working environment in the 19s century, he shows the importance of “healthy workplace". This working philosophy has been showed in all his works, "the most relevant work about sustainable is the Hangzhou Alipay Building, first of all, from the design's perspective, we want it to be like a block, although Hangzhou is in a good natural conditions, only limited working environment have natural ventilation, while in spring and autumn, the Alipay Building doesn’t needs any air conditioner".

“Sustainability does not necessarily mean advanced technology. Instead, it means the capacity of a building to operate properly with a high level of energy efficiency. In this post-real estate era, it's more about living in harmony with nature than lots of capital. “

——Wu Gang

This salon event was attended by ten distinguished guests, such as Ye Chen, senior designer with the EID, Karuna Hase, associate of interior design at HASSELL, Min Wei, director of SPARK China, Thomas Bulter, associate of workplace design at Woods Bagot,  Wang Chen, principal at W&R GROUP, Wu Congbao, associate partner at Atelier Liu Yuyang Architects, Zhang Pengfei, Principal and Associate Director of SHPA, Zhang Xiaojun, director of MJ-sekkei, and Li Junjian, design director of China Shanghai Architecture Design & Research Institute Co., Ltd. as well as Isa Ye, founder of YoungBird and Cai Yanguo, founder of MATSU.

"ORGANISM" of Happy Work

During the panel discussion, the guests had a brainstorm under the subject of “The ‘X’ Function of Happy Work”, and managed to understand, as designers and users, the varied combinations of the "Copenhagen" collection under different circumstances. They also discussed about which office-space functions - apart from the existing ones - are yet to be explored in a bid to boost staff happiness in this ever-changing age.