MVRDV has won a competition to design two buildings in the Tianfu Software Park located in Chengdu, China. One is a 150-meter-tall office tower, while the other is a four-story cultural center with an art museum, conference hall, library, and exhibition space. The cultural center of Tianfu Software Park has a faceted sloping form that encourages visitors to climb its green roof and terraced interior.
The office tower is designed to optimize the efficiency of the floor plates and maximize views of the mountains to the east. The tower’s atrium is open at the base, where swooping lines gradually merge with a shopping podium, while a mesh façade encloses it. This allows the atrium to act as a buffer zone, allowing passive cross-ventilation through the mesh and via openable panels in the opposite facades. The atrium also reduces solar gain within the office spaces. It shades the terraces, helping to reduce the cooling requirements of the office spaces and thereby reducing the building’s energy use.
The cultural center is designed to follow the triangular outline of its site. The different programs are stacked in a stepped arrangement to form terraces that are oriented toward the park. The terraced interior of the building is covered by a green roof of faceted triangular panels that create a semi-outdoor atrium space. The roof is equipped with public plazas, a continuous pathway, and lush green planters that extend the landscape on top of the sloping building. Additionally, the roof has glazed clerestory windows, allowing daylight to enter the interior.
“In our designs for both office tower and cultural centre, the atrium is key”, says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “Though they take different forms – one more vertical and the other terraced and traversable – both atria serve the same Functions. They bring in greenery, they connect the buildings from bottom to top, they provide shading and ventilation that make the buildings sustainable, and most importantly, they make these buildings exciting, social places to be.”
Project Info
Architect: MVRDV
Location: Chengdu, China
Founding Partner in charge: Winy Maas
Partner/Director: Wenchian Shi
Design Team: Kyo Suk Lee, Sredej Bunnag, Americo Iannazzone, Jiani You, Lucien Glass, Zhou Wang, Samuel Tam, Letizia Pezzini, Matteo Spalletti, Andrius Ribikauskas, Amanda Galiana Ortega, Cai Huang, Xinyuan Zhang, Shanshan Wu, Echo Zhai, Tanja Dubbelaar, Runjie Liu
Director MVRDV Shanghai: Peter Chang
Structural engineer: CSWADI, Buro Happold
MEP: CSWADI
Environmental advisor: Buro Happold
Façade consultant: RFR
