The 150-meter office tower is located prominently in the hearth of Qianhai Economic Zone in Shenzhen. The office tower was designed as an owner-occupied headquarters, with the company’s flagship showrooms and public amenities at ground levels. The building’s shape and delicate design emerged from studying the interaction between the building volume and its site surrounding environment, Weiqiao Group’s corporate identity, and company’s desire for landmark building.
The design concept takes advantage of the tower’s location surrounded by Jinke Street and Huaxiu Street and adjacent right next to the Bao’An Bridge Network that leads directly to the nearby Bao’An Waterfront Park. The overall building volume has been split into two wings which are orientated and address the site location in two main sea and urban view directions. As a key urban gesture, the lower building wing has been twisted in order to establish a specific visual and physical connection between the new headquarters tower and the neighboring public bridge platform.
At ground level, it was of great importance that the newly proposed headquarters appears much more than just an office building in the urban fabric. Commercial retail spaces and business support functions have been introduced and distributed between the underground, ground, and podium floors. The outdoor public circulation between those ground levels has been designed as a continuous vertical landscape that connects directly the public floors with the pedestrian public bridge network in Bao’An district.
The initial design request was for an interior that would provide a flexible workspace with consideration for potential future changes needed by the client. A structural design solution was chosen in order to provide maximum interior office space flexibility by introducing a building external diagrid for the lower part of the office headquarters. The diagrid structure provides more structural efficiency compared to a traditional column and beam building and its primary task is to handle the gravity loads for the building while the building core absorbs the building’s lateral loads.
The great atria void creates a great opportunity to collect natural daylight, and clean air and generate a passive natural ventilation method by capitalizing on the principle of a solar updraft within the tall vertical 24-floor high central atrium void. Furthermore, the atrium and sky-gardens glazing panels that form the central void are designed with double super white Low-E coated glazing material that catches and holds light which reduces the reliance on artificial light.
The tower design creates a flexible off-center service core on each of the floor plan wings, at the lower part of the office tower, in order to allow for maximum flexibility and uninterrupted interior office space that could adopt diverse interior office layouts easily. The office floors have been connected in between with stairs located in the indoor atrium sky gardens. This special design arrangement would further help and stimulate the internal communication and collaboration between different departments located at multiple floor levels.
The upper part of the headquarter office tower has been designed with the intent of the layout and program of those upper floors could be easily changed from VIP office spaces to executive suites for the management board of Weiqiao Group, in case there would be any need in the future. To ensure maximum comfort, living quality, and gorgeous sea panorama views each floor has been divided into two executive suites.
JKP Architects sought to develop a façade system that maintains the visual qualities of an all-glass façade design: panoramic views, abundant daylighting, and refined aesthetics while responding to the demands of seasonally changing external climatic conditions. An innovative closed cavity façade was proposed with solar blinds positioned in the air gaps that feature minimized solar thermal transfer while providing acoustic separation between the office interiors and the busy outdoor surroundings. The exterior façade layer of the tower façade is outdoor horizontal fins that help to protect the interior space from long exposure to direct sunlight and reduced sun glare in the office spaces.
Weiqiao Pioneering Headquarters is designed to be a new landmark for the city that symbolizes future success and growth for Weiqiao Corporation and as a model of innovative sustainable development for all of China.
