Tall & Urban News

Following a two-year process, on 13 January 2020, MVRDV revealed their competition entry and research process for the next Tencent headquarters campus. Located on a 133-hectare site in Qianhai Bay, Shenzhen, Tencent’s brief called for an entire urban district including offices, homes for Tencent employees, commercial units, public amenities, schools, and a conference center. The proposals and studies aim to integrate this campus into a smart city district shaped like a continuous undulating mountain range, with a waterfront park winding its way around the base.

To accommodate their growth, Chinese tech giant Tencent began plans for its new headquarters in Qianhai Bay almost immediately after completion of their current Shenzhen headquarters, the Tencent Seafront Towers. But their ambition for their next home is calling for a total of 2 million square meters of floor space to accommodate offices for 80,000 to 100,000 employees and homes for 19,000 residents, to be occupied by Tencent employees.

Beyond its scale, the brief foregrounds the “user value” of technology and the benefits it can bring to everyday life. It was requested that their new campus be an “exemplary” smart city district, demonstrating the city-altering potential of the latest urban technologies.

MVRDV’s studies envision the Tencent campus as 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. At the foot of the buildings, a waterfront park winds its way along the entire eastern side of the site, facing into the Qianhai Bay. This park also expands up the lower levels of the adjacent buildings to form greenery-filled terraces.

Placed throughout the park are many of the public buildings for the district, including a school and kindergarten, a sports center, and data center, among others. At the southern end of the park is the most notable building on the campus, a conference center shaped like a rock at the foot of the hills, flanking the entrance to Qianhai Bay.

At an intersection of the street grid in the heart of the office-zone is the project’s “beating heart,” the information plaza. This spherical space, carved from the corners of four adjacent buildings, displays data related to the everyday functioning of the Tencent campus, from occupancy rates to carbon usage. Another intervention is the transportation strategy for the campus, which will involve a highway, along the eastern side of the site, giving access to four underground car parks. The street grid itself is reserved for autonomous cars and a shuttle bus loop to easily move around employees and residents. In addition, metro and bus lines to the city run along both eastern and western edges of the site to connect the Tencent campus to the rest of Shenzhen.

“Our studies and competition entry for Tencent are an attempt to show that the smart city is also the green city”, says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “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.”

In their design process for the Tencent Campus, MVRDV conducted a research project to arrive at their preferred design for a modern tech campus. The design team developed 28 different outline designs, ordering them into a design “genealogy” that traced multiple evolutionary branches as the team sought to add key qualities to their previous designs.

“All studies were scripted, thus preparing a new way of designing and maintaining future smart cities”, added Winy Maas.

“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,” she added.

For more on this story, go to MVRDV.