The international competition winning design NFU and SZU Technology Park is located within Shenzhen’s Nanshan Dashahe Innovation Corridor, bordering the New Shenzhen University campus. With three of its four phases completed and the last under construction, the new technology park provides an enhanced environment and a platform for technological research. The 528,000 sqm project comprises IT incubator, R&D office, medical instruments development and entrepreneurship services.
The conceptual approach acknowledges nature as an invaluable resource and a source of inspiration. The design strategy preserves natural site features, notably an ancient burial mound hill and an existing military boundary while introducing a central landscape spline negotiating between the existing site features. The campus is envisioned as a city with four main districts defining physical zones, while the unifying landscape becomes the campus’ green lungs. These districts reflect specific programmatic functions of Medical Instruments & Meters in the south-west, Laboratories and Research in the north-west, Entrepreneurship Incubator Center in the north and A-class offices in the east. The districts are oriented towards the dedicated central landscape – the organizational, environmental and social element. The layout enables serving all the buildings by the peripheral roads thereby ensuring a pedestrian friendly campus.
The undulating terrain of the site is capitalized on by embedding the building volumes in the topography, with the peripheral road and the central green serving different levels. The ground levels provide commercial and complementary functions and activate the street scape. The atriums of the buildings are linked at a subterrain level to facilitate internal movement. The building layouts and their inter-relation are strategically organized to orient views and increase natural lighting while keeping the masterplan compact.
The building floor plates correspond to the distinct programmatic requirements but share a common organizational language. The organic volumes of the buildings enable a smaller footprint and larger upper floor plates providing a characteristically high FAR. The central atriums open to the inner landscape and bring in natural light and enhance internal visual connection.
The Laboratories and Research district responds to its adjacency with New Shenzhen University. The building volumes articulate an open interactive space in the north, shaded by a unifying roof and creating a dialogue with the university campus. Three towers of the Incubator Center have central cores and modular offices of sizes suitable for its program; their layout and orientation enable views of the surrounding from all of the offices. From west to east, the gradually rising volumes of the buildings form a discrete skyline of the campus, articulating the distinct architectural volumes into a singular formal concept that embraces and echoes natural order.
