As the city is being developed and the increasing number of talented residents, the physical boundary of Shenzhen has been expanding continuously, which results the decreasing of public space and nature environment. Therefore, Shenzhen proposed, in the city design guideline, to give certain percentage of the land being developed back to the community as public spaces, in order to make up the reduced amount of the public spaces to certain extent due to the intense development. Meanwhile, there is an elevated pedestrian system on the "second floor" of the city along the green space and newly developed land in Shenzhen. Hence, how to effectively create a continuous but diverse shared space that surrounds podium and connects to the public space on the ground and to the planned sky pedestrian system, becomes the starting point. And, to explore a way to embed the vernacular arcade-like design language into the project.
The diagonal pattern is the primary design language, aiming to break the regular orthogonal urban grid, in order to activate the ground space, creating a direct connection between the metro station on the northeast corner and the main pedestrian entrance on the southwest corner, to form a pedestrian-friendly space. The diagonal pattern on the two dimensional plane is unfolded to three dimensional space, turning into a spatial canvas to guide the design and form-finding of ground plaza, podium, facade and the bridge supporting structure, which shapes the public, semi-public and private spaces.
The project is programmed as client owned office space, leasable/salable office spaces, retails, canteen, service spaces and ground plaza. Under the conventional development pattern, the client-owned space and the retail space would be the focus of design. However, with the demand of pedestrian right and city public space and the number of younger population, the starting point of a new/modern office space has been altered to adapt the shared and diverse working pattern, along with the demand of the working space in high-tech companies. Meanwhile, the emphasis is placed on the organizing the relationship between the client-owned circulation and the public circulation, in order to make these spaces compatible to each other.
The public shared space is placed where the tower met the podium, while the rest of programs are laid out vertically on the two opposite directions. Along the direction to the top of tower, there are canteen, product showroom, client owned office, SOHO and the sky garden. On the opposite direction, there are co-working space for high-tech companies, retails, arcade-like storefronts and the lobbies(main lobby and staff lobby). The amphitheater and outdoor terraces are laid out horizontally. From the ground floor to the sixth floor, there are public and semi-public space. Besides the vertical circulation in the core, there is a combination of the escalator system and the sky corridor to serve the public and occupants, which diversifies the experience of vertical circulation and elevated pedestrian system and alleviates the traffic in the core during the peak times.