Office complex inside a Creative Industrial Park
Client: corporate client (anonymous)
Location: Wuxi, Jiangsu province, China
Gross floor area: 16000sqm
Design: commenced from August 2016
Design Stage: conceptual scheme design equivalent to RIBA Working Stage 1-2
Design team: HMD Shanghai and Pro-Form Architects ltd (Jing Wu, José Campon)
The client is a creative industry incubator based in Wuxi China.
the brief was to build an office complex that houses three functions, cooperate headquarters, funding and studio quarter. However, the client did not provide a detailed brief at this early stage of the development. The concept design was aimed to explore the potentials of the site and help the client rethinking and developing the initial brief.
The site is “C” shaped and difficulty to be used efficiently, as the narrowest part of the site is less than 20 meters, which means circulation area could account for excessive portion of the floor area if the building had been stretched too wide.
The Design team decided to deliver the highest possible density on the eastern part of the site, which leave the rest of the site free of above-ground building mass, at least in early phase.
The planning permission guidance indicates that only 11000sqm can be built for this site, but the client was looking for 16000sqm building area including the parking spaces.
While full underground car parking means deep evacuation, high building cost and on-site period, the architects tried to strike a balance among those factors, by using a ramp-style car parking area that links ground level parking and basement parking. While the original purpose was to reduce the building cost, yet visually this achieved an accessible planted roof. From this planted accessible podium onwards, a ramp-gantry pedestrian roaming system wrapped around the basic building mass and dug holes in and out of the massing, to add some flavour onto this functionalized building. This network, integrating roof run-off rainwater reuse system, ended up at ground level in a form of wetland feature and underground storage tank. The rain water collected could be used for the existing underwater filming pool, which was treated as the future landscape core of the site.
Mathematically, the departmental area schedule provided by the client showed that the ratio between three function quarters was 5/3/2, which led the architects towards a massing solution that merged the two smaller quarters together to counter-balance the main function- the HQs. The funding main hall was elected to stand in the center to act as the visual heart of the complex, taking advantage of its pure form and translucent envelope.
The client’s ideas of how to use each individual room were not clear and firm yet and this situation may last for years into the building’s occupancy. Thus, the architects tried to deliver a building shell that can be altered internally by using generically planned structure and curtain walling. And future changes could be catered for if they observe the modular of the grids. The overall open/transparent full height window/curtain walls configuration means high unwanted solar gain during the eastern Chinese summer. Therefore, an overall shading system was desirable.
This shading system employed perforated screen/shell of Corten steel paneling to represent the site’s steel industrial past (used to be steel sheet blooming factory) , and in the same time the colour and texture of Corten steel also resembled that of ‘zi sha’(a renowned unique local terracotta/ceramic) and can be a realistically achievable replacement. To enhance the visual connection of the new and the old, the of Corten steel array was trimmed per the shape of gables of those factory buildings.