Innovative Industrial Service Center designed by Architect Carlos R. Gomez in Shenzhen, China.
Architecture concept
After visiting the site and doing some research of it and the surroundings, we face a main problem in this design: how to make our building unique and innovative but in harmony with the surrounding buildings…The most impressive thing from our understanding of the surrounding environment is that all the different buildings around our site are six, seven or eight floors height which means there are a few high-rise buildings there, and if we design some ordinary building with one or two towers with a podium, by one side, it is very hard to show an innovative character on it, and by other side, it will look too much different volumetrically from the surrounding buildings, so we are using the concept of “growing up” in our design.
The proposed concept is to split horizontally all the small areas of the assignment program in 4 towers, and to split vertically all the big spaces of the assignment program in 4 platforms.
Our proposal will not be one or two towers with similar height depending on all the different functions asked and the shape of the site. This innovative design will have four towers growing up one by one, from one corner of the site to the other, to form a whole circulation.
The height of the lowest tower will be 40.30 m, and the highest one will be 85.60 m, through this method, the project will respect the environment mostly and later, if this building needs to add or to delete some functions, depending on the needs of its use by the government, would be very easy to be changed.
The other main point of our design is the connection between its different areas. Everything is connected with each other today in this globalized world. For our building, connection means communication and more efficiency, the common method of connection in tower is just to use the podium to connect the building only from the first floor, and with our scheme, based on the functions, we create horizontal connections in different levels through four platforms, connecting the four towers.
These connections between towers we called it as “big space”, because they have no interior partitions. This scheme allow get connected through the different towers very conveniently and quickly, saving time in their displacements, and saving time today means saving money too.
Beside this idea, we know that a common problem of workers in today’s rapid developed society is that they are sitting all the day in the office, lack of public and green space, but through our scheme, this design tries to solve this problem as much as possible, using these big spaces’ roofs, people can go out very easily to share fresh air and communicated with each other instead of going down to the street, using the elevator and then going up again, they have lots of choices and totally different experiences when passing by, which will release their pressure of working allowing them being more efficient. This idea of “green public” space creates more easy and human-based experiences, and are various in every two or three floors, changing the position or the shape to create different spaces, which are also good for the ventilation of the building.
Our whole project is in harmony with the environment, even thinking about the design of the first floor, we were considering it from the feeling of people going through, to create a very good space in human-scale. We used the method of deleting, creating as much as possible flexible spaces, that by one hand, this building shows its most toleration to the city, giving more public space and accelerating the circulation of the city, and by other hand, showing its most friendly attitude to the people coming to, moving, resting, or just arriving by different kinds of transportation, as soon as possible.
As some functions are underground, we will create flexible but organized holes for natural light and fresh air to these rooms, besides, it create the connection between underground and ground floors, people can see each other from different directions .as a result, the space in first floor and below become more interesting and accessible for people with vertical green landscape and escalators.
The road crossing our site from north to south is connected with the street coming from the north, and we use it to allow people coming by private transportation, entering to the 3 floors car parking. After considering carefully about all the requirements from the assignment paper, our scheme meets all the needing asked about the parking, and we designed three main entrances for cars.
Functions design
Based on the surrounding analysis and functions of our project, we have very clear zones for different functions, on the left part of our site, we put all the single rooms and other involving functions because the adjacent zone left beside our site has commercial and residential area which is very convenient for life, also this part in our site is more private comparatively and less noisy because of the type of street close.
And on the right part of our site, we put all the offices and other involving functions because this part is near the two main roads of our site, and because it is better to show open and landmark characters of our project. We used the other functions such as auditorium/canteen which is serviced for all offices/single rooms as the “big space connection” to connect office towers/single rooms tower, creating free spaces as well. Some functions that are more public and open such as spiritual civilization base we put it in the first floor underground because is very easy for people to get access to, and it can serve people both inside our building and outside.
Façade / Energy-saving design / Self-sufficient energetically
The original source of our façade design comes from some traditional elements in China, the Chinese knot and paper cut for window decoration. We just thought about some modern ways to use these traditional elements both beautiful and energy-saving. That’s because we designed a double-skin in our proposal for office building. The one inside is normal façade of glass, and the other one outside is developed from these traditional elements both for self-sufficient and decoration of our elevation. Besides, all the façades of our project use the same elements, just only changing its size depending on the function inside, in different ways to make this project looked united very well.
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