The Summit | OMA - Office for Metropolitan Architecture

In recent years as unicorn tech companies have translated their brand identity into signature headquarters buildings, two typologies have emerged: the egalitarian campus and the powerful, unified icon. The impressive scale of the Technology Masterplan development in South China has allowed for an effective embrace of both strategies: a campus of iconic buildings. For the masterplan’s central headquarters building, we propose to maintain these qualities by fitting a vertically arranged campus of office volumes into a singular, iconic envelope to create a natural “summit”. To form a strong, natural center-point, The Summit embraces a strategy of mediation in response to the various elements of the site. Starting from the heights of the adjacent mid- rise buildings and landscapes, the building’s silhouette rises to form a central apex. The result is a unifying, faceted, mountainlike envelope; its iconic legibility strengthened by the complexity it contains within. The vertical “campus” is generated by multiplying and densifying the masterplan’s various blob and block buildings into a studied stack—a natural, vertical extension of the surrounding urban fabric. The different floorplates allow tenants to arrange various office configurations suited to their needs. Between the volumes, semi-conditioned outdoor spaces are filled with light, shadows, views, and people, all contributing to a dynamic composition. The ambiguous hierarchy between objects and container rejects a singular reading, forging instead a dual identity for the headquarters building and the future of the internet industry—a singular realm with infinite possibilities.

Partner: Chris van Duijn

Project Architects: Kellen Huang, John Thurtle

Team: Giuseppe Bandieramonte, Ken Fung, Joanna Gu, Tijmen Klone, Martin Lau, Chen

Lu, Hector Song, Arthur Wong, Yuemeng Zhao, Junxiang Zhang, Serena Zhang

COLLABORATORS

Local Design Institute: CCDI Group

Structure: Ramboll

Vertical Transportation: Ramboll

Sustainability Consultant: Ramboll

Traffic Consultant: Qianhai SPOM

Façade Consultant: VS-A

Multimedia: Loom on the Moon, Atchain

Renderings: Tegmark

Model Photography: Shuo Dang