Construction has been completed on the MVRDV-designed Shenzhen Women & Children’s Centre, transforming an old mixed-use tower in the Chinese megacity into a “vibrant and colorful skyscraper.” The 330-foot-tall tower contains a hotel alongside a range of facilities for the welfare of women and children.

The original tower was completed in 1994 during a period of rapid growth in Shenzhen. Plagued by two decades of fire safety concerns, the tower remained largely empty until the decision in 2019 to overhaul the building.

MVRDV’s proposal for the tower saw the existing structure reused in an effort to avoid the carbon cost of demolishing and rebuilding. The most visible aspect of the transformation is a new facade featuring a grid of multicolored exterior frames. The new three-foot-deep envelope is designed to provide extra shading while also incorporating openable panels for natural ventilation.

The facade’s vibrant color palette of yellow, orange, pink, and green seeks to communicate the layout within. A multicolored plinth holds a service center for women and children, including a library, auditorium, children’s theater, and therapy rooms. On the tower itself, which contains a hotel, the color palette gives way to a neutral white.

Outside, a courtyard, which was originally used as a parking lot, has been converted into a public space with a food court, while the tower’s crown contains a large accessible terrace. At the tower’s base, four primary entrances to the complex are highlighted by a concentration of different colors to improve the building’s navigability; an approach which continues in the main lobby.

MVRDV estimates that their design approach saved almost 850,000 cubic feet of concrete from the original structure, with a carbon-saving equivalent to 11,800 flights from Amsterdam to Shenzhen. To ensure the existing tower’s usability, additions to the structure included filling in some of the original design’s awkward geometry to create more efficient, resolved floor plans.

“The Shenzhen Women and Children’s Centre could be a pioneering project for Shenzhen,” said MVRDV founding partner Jacob van Rijs about the scheme. “With the city’s fast-paced growth, many existing buildings were not really designed to have a long lifespan. That is a recipe for either an epidemic of demolition or, ideally, a great wave of adaptive reuse.”

“Showing that even the most inadequate of these structures can be reused could save a crazy amount of concrete going to landfill — and eliminate millions of tons of carbon emissions that would have been created replacing that concrete,” van Rijs added.

The tower is one of several MVRDV-designed schemes to recently feature in our editorial. Last month, the firm completed a high school renovation project in the Netherlands alongside Van Boven Architecten. In June, the studio completed ‘The Canyon’ tower in San Francisco, while also beginning construction of a tower in Chengdu, China, inspired by bamboo-weaving traditions.