The latest in a lineage of corporate headquarters designs that dates to 1965 is officially underway in China’s Hunan Province, the product of a multi-year collaboration between HENN and the heavy manufacturing giant Zoomlion.

The Z-shaped design includes a museum, data center, and even sports facilities for workers of new the 311,000-square-meter (3.34-million-square-foot) industrial park. Project leader Hua Qiao described its form as an “immense, cut stone floating above its natural surroundings.” 

Once realized in 2023, the Zoomlion headquarters will eventually join HENN's Zalando BHQ-Z project that recently topped out in Berlin in its growing portfolio of major corporate designs. 

Per the architects, the new park “balances the client’s production needs with a sensitivity to its rural context, the geometric Headquarters blends into the hilly and densely wooded Changsha green-corridor. Made from white concrete, the classic architectural plinth becomes a faceted landscape of waterways, walkable green slopes and staircases. The elevated ground plane traverses an irregularly sloped site and spans a busy motorway to create seamless connections between the north and south sides of the site. The angular main building is wrapped in transparent floor-to-ceiling glass and cantilevers twelve meters over the site, appearing to float above the folded stone landscape.”

The Munich-based firm has been taking on several major projects in the country over the past decade. Once construction is complete, the massive corporate HQ will be added to a list of Chinese designs that includes the studio’s 2012 vision for an Urban Planning Museum in Nantong, a sports center in the same city, a high-rise office tower in Shanxi Province, and their forthcoming Medview Regenerative Medicine Innovation Center now underway in Guangzhou.