The Midwest Commodity Exchange Center, a marketplace for metal futures, is a seven-building complex in Xi’an – part of the Chinese government’s trade infrastructure initiative. At its centre, an impressive five-storey main lobby features cascading and curved interior walls of specially extruded aluminum. These vertical slats encase towering LED displays that show scrolling commodity symbols and prices at a massive scale, their digits pixelated by the walls’ slatted surfaces in a throwback to the traditional ticker displays of older exchanges. Undulating, tiered surfaces reappear throughout the interior, following a strict colour palette of white and grey varied with accents of gunmetal and wood.

Project: Midwest Inland Port Financial Town

Location: Xi’an, China

Firm: Hallucinate Design Office, China

Team: Wenliang Wang