MVRDV has just released images of the firm’s competition entry for the next Tencent headquarters campus, located in Qianhai Bay, Shenzhen. Highlighting the green potential of Smart City Technology, the project imagines an entire urban district including offices, homes for Tencent employees, commercial units, public amenities, schools, and a conference center.
After a two-year work in progress, MVRDV exposes its design evolution for the modern tech campus of Chinese giant Tencent. Exploring new technological realms, the project imagines a Smart City district “shaped like a continuous undulating mountain range, with a waterfront park winding its way around the base”. In fact, MVRDV’s vision puts in place a “grid of over 100 buildings with an undulating roof of photovoltaic panels, with multiple bridges connecting buildings to form a continuous surface reminiscent of a mountain range”.
Following a challenging and ambitious brief, the proposal generated a smart city district, with the latest urban technologies, expanding on a total of 2 million square meters of floor space to accommodate offices for 80,000–100,000 employees and homes for 19,000 residents, to be occupied by Tencent employees.
On another hand, along the entire eastern side of the site, a waterfront park is envisioned, “expanding up the lower levels of the adjacent buildings to form greenery-filled terraces” and hosting many of the public buildings of the district, like a school and a kindergarten. At the southern end of the park, a conference center shaped like a rock stands tall, forming an “iconic marker of Tencent’s global influence”.
Our studies and competition entry for Tencent are an attempt to show that the smart city is also the green city […] With ubiquitous smart city elements, headlined by a futuristic data hub at the heart of the campus, Tencent employees would feel enveloped by technology. But they are also literally surrounded by nature, with the serpentine park always within a short walking distance, and green terraces all around them. -- Winy Maas, MVRDV founding partner.
Moreover, when it comes to the transportation infrastructure, the streets are reserved for autonomous cars and a shuttle bus loop, with metro and bus lines running along both eastern and western edges of the site to connect the Tencent campus to the rest of Shenzhen. On a more technological level, the information plaza, “carved from the corners of four adjacent buildings”, highlights important numbers and data related to the everyday functioning of the Tencent campus, from occupancy rates to carbon usage.
All studies were scripted, thus preparing a new way of designing and maintaining future smart cities […] The final competition entry was a synthesis of everything learned in this iterative process, resulting in a tech campus that is diverse, flexible, green, dynamic, open, adaptable, and above all, visionary. -- Winy Maas, MVRDV founding partner.
