Chengdu Co-Innovation and Cooperation Center / Laguarda.Low Architects
Text description provided by the architects. Designed by Laguarda.Low Architects, Chengdu Co-Innovation and Cooperation Center has a total GBA of 150,000 square meters that seamlessly integrates office, dwelling, and retail uses. Its core design concept is to create a vibrant and pleasant urban ecological public space while giving the project a distinct and recognizable form, and promoting communication and interaction between people. The curvilinear architectural form creates a dialogue with the surrounding high-rise buildings in a sweeping gesture within the urban grid, forms a dialogue with the surrounding environment in the contrast, and creates a new ecological urban and business space.
Challenges and Breakthroughs. The Dayuan district where the project is located is a designated high-tech zone with ideal infrastructure, a strong neighborhood ambiance, and a prosperous commercial district. Despite its location advantage, the project faces the challenge of fitting within surrounding homogeneous development projects and limitations on its land conditions. Therefore, given the limited scale of the project and the height limit of 70 meters, the immediate challenge for the new project was how to create a unique landmark that not only stands apart from the surrounding objects but also enhances the overall image of the community.
Innovate and Reborn. The government has formulated detailed urban design guidelines for the Dayuan Area, which helps standardize and unify the architectural and urban space interface. However, it also limits the possibilities for new projects, resulting in the current situation of serious homogeneity of architectural layout and urban space in the area. If we chose to continue the same traditional layout approach, the project would not only cause serious confrontation with the surrounding projects but also miss a great opportunity to vitalize the entire area. Through the layout of two opposing arced volumes, the Chengdu Co-Innovation and Cooperation Center masterly breaks the grid-like urban texture in its surroundings. The architecture softens and enriches the surrounding rigid and unitary street space provides bright, spacious, and diverse sight corridors for the center and adjacent blocks, and incorporates a diagonal entrance plaza to set the center apart. A lively interior courtyard is formed by the arced volumes through which pedestrian paths intersect, connecting all public open spaces. The curved outline fits the site boundary as much as possible, maintaining the continuity of the street so that the entire building has a prominent shape in the area while being compatible with the environment.
The height of the overall building decreases gradually from north to south, meeting the requirements for the concession of the adjacent Poly International Plaza. The two opposing crescents float around an elliptical oasis like Koi fish passing in a pond. The sloping curved roof with hyperboloid changes forms an endless spiral posture, creating an attractive “fifth façade” that provides a unique urban view of the entire block and surrounding high-rise buildings. The flowing and soft arc shape convey open, integrated, warm, and secure architectural aesthetics, becoming an attractive landmark in the south of this international city.
Three-dimensional Landscape. In order to create a quiet environment within the block that escapes the hustle and bustle of the city, a sunken central garden was created that interacts with the landscape and first-floor retail. Vertical traffic that flows into the central garden is placed directly at the four corners of the plot, creating multi-directional connections to the central garden from the city. The landscape design of the garden continues the pure geometric sense of the architecture. Three alleys divide the courtyard into different areas, green platforms at varying heights are created by staggering the arced volumes at different elevations, and a semi-open setback garden is arranged on top to extend the natural landscape from ground to roof. The connections between the social balconies, the central garden, the sky garden, and the street space reduce the impact of the building mass on external pedestrian space and enhance the interaction with the city.
Aesthetic and Economic. The curved curtain wall was one of the challenges of this project. We optimized the curved surface of the curtain wall at the beginning of the design. Most of the curved surface is made of standard vertical glass, with less than 1.3% non-standard glass used, which saved the client considerable construction costs. Through the control of the curvature of the glass at the top corners, each piece of glass is simplified into a single curved glass and unified by the change of the mullions. The curtain wall adopts low-iron glass, giving the project a more urban business aesthetic.
The Architect’s Mission. The responsibility of architects is to improve the quality of the city within which they practice, to add vitality to the lives of city residents, and to enhance the value of the projects that investors entrust architects with. Thoroughly understanding the surrounding environment, specific plot conditions, and the design task at hand, architects should boldly ask questions, be brave in innovation, and maintain a humanistic approach. Buoyed by our professionalism and design talent, we create innovative works that are sensible yet exceed expectations. These are the exact principles that the Vanke Chengdu Co-Innovation and Cooperation Center adheres to.
