Spanish architecture practice Atelier Entropic has designed a new e-commerce hub featuring a new roof motif in Kaunas, Lithuania. 

Named The Serpent, the meandering complex is designed as an e-commerce hub including retail units and a warehouse. 

Encompassing a total of 70,400 square meters, the project reimagines the standard big-box typology of conventional warehouse/retail programming, to create a continuous street of programs, with plazas, green spaces, and public functions. 

Image © Fusao 

Other facilities will be dedicated to digital shopping, pick up zones, and new forms of retail experience. 

"The challenge was to rethink the suburban shopping typology, to an experience-oriented retail typology," said Atelier Entropic. 

"How can we match user experience, complex logistic movement, environmental response, and optimized retail design into a single cohesive project?."

Image © Fusao

The project is divided into two ares: the public program is designed in the front side, while a logistic drop-off zones are placed in the back side. 

The roof gently raises and lowers accommodating extra program requirements, whilst elegantly integrating itself into the surrounding landscape.

Image © Prompt 

Through short term drop off points the project adapts to future conditions of integrating new forms of autonomous personal transportation and public mobility.

Image © Prompt

The architectural design reinterprets the standard warehouse section into a new contemporary roof motif, which serves to maximize solar EV gain and allows diffused light into the interior, optimizing the environmental response. A serrated retail promenade allows for every retail unit to maximize shop frontage and visibility.

The Serpent connects with the city centre through a bridge, which continues through the project on an upper-level streetscape creating great access to upper-level program, until reaching its terminus, in an interior plaza.

Image © Prompt

Project facts

Project name: The Serpent

Architects: Atelier Entropic

Team: Geoffrey Eberle, Magdalena Mróz, Alberto Rosal, Wiktoria Kołakowska

Location: Kaunas, Lithuania

Size: 70,400m2

Client: SBA-URBAN

Date: 2022

Top rendering © Fusao

All renderings © Fusao and Prompt 

All drawings © Atelier Entropic

> via Atelier Entropic