LYCS Architecture wins an invited competition for a 32,000 sqm testing and assessment research center in the city of Shenzhen. It is a mixed-use building including offices, residential and commercial. The project conceptually begins with the traditional Chinese urban design idea of a “miniature city” and divides the site into 10 equal volumes. Then the volumes are aligned corresponding to the scattered programs across the landscape.

The project maintains horizontal consistency while allowing for the necessary building components to address diverse and at times conflicting desires for the overall design concept.
As the building volumes shift in plan according to programmatic adjacencies, the glass curtain walls remain continuous and the floor plates are consistently continuous. Meanwhile, the third floor is being dramatically transformed into a tessellated plate that twists horizontally to tension the homogenous facade and break the overall continuity of the design. Additionally, the external stairs break down the facade's impassibly clean horizontal lines, allowing the design of the facade to function both in the big picture horizontally, and in precise detail diagonally.

The building volume is radically interrupted by a series of tessellated Hyperbolic Parabola surfaces on the third floor. This floor fundamentally challenges the standard office building with a synthetic gathering of three alternate architectural inventions: interruption of the perfect horizontal grid, connection of many floors with varying heights, and formation of a wave-like landscape terrace. Each terrace is smoothly connected by ramps and steps, providing people with multiple choices of circulation and rich spatial experiences. The terrace roof also extends into the interior space of the third floor, creating spaces for public exhibition, education, service and commercial.

The building volumes are connected on the second floor by different outdoor and indoor corridors, forming courtyards in the interstices of the unity. The courtyards, together with roof gardens and third floor landscape terraces, create a vertical green system.

Architects: LYCS Architecture
Location: Shenzhen, China
Project Team: Hao Ruan, Yuan Zhan, Xu Li, Meng Yang, Yan Li, Peng Wang, Vedrana Puhalo, Zhengmeng Dong
Consultant: Shenzhen Institute of Building Research
Project Period: 2011-2013
Size: 32,000 sqm
Images: Courtesy of LYCS Architecture