In recent years as unicorn tech companies have translated their brand identity into signature headquarters buildings, two typologies have emerged: the egalitarian campus and the powerful, unified icon.
The impressive scale of the Shenzhen Technology Masterplan development has allowed for an effective embrace of both strategies: a campus of iconic buildings. For the masterplan’s central headquarters building, we propose to maintain these qualities by fitting a vertically arranged campus of office volumes into a singular, iconic envelope to create a natural “summit”.
To form a strong, natural center-point, The Summit embraces a strategy of mediation in response to the various elements of the site. Starting from the heights of the adjacent mid-rise buildings and landscapes, the building’s silhouette rises to form a central apex. The result is a unifying, faceted, mountainlike envelope; its iconic legibility strengthened by the complexity it contains within.The vertical “campus” is generated by multiplying and densifying the masterplan’s various blob and block buildings into a studied stack—a natural, vertical extension of the surrounding urban fabric. The different floorplates allow tenants to arrange various office configurations suited to their needs. Between the volumes, semi-conditioned outdoor spaces are filled with light, shadows, views, and people, all contributing to a dynamic composition. The ambiguous hierarchy between objects and container rejects a singular reading, forging instead a dual identity for the headquarters building and the future of the internet industry—a singular realm with infinite possibilities.
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