Steven Holl's Vanke Center: Eco-Friendly "Horizontal Skyscraper" Floats In China
by Alex Pasternack, New York, NY 
on 05.22.07
One of China's most exciting new architectural designs isn't rising in Shenzhen, the country's southern megalopolis, so much as it's being floated there. Where Steven Holl Architects' Linked Hybrid in Beijing envisions a system of residential towers connected by bridges like a dance circle, their new Shenzhen project, set for completion next year, lingers above the ground like a cubist flying dragon. By turning tall into long and raising the snaking, aluminum-encased building on pillars, the Vanke Center encourages more communication within, offers better views of a nearby lake and mountains for inhabitants and provides welcome shade over an expanse of walkways and green space below. “We like to fuse the social with our approach to buildings,” says Li Hu, the Beijing-based architect leading the project. That the building is being made to house the country's biggest mega-developer Vanke helps dramatize the crucial role of large corporations at a time when private interests in China are dangerously competing with the social good.
Fortunately, the building matches its striking, airy design with a light ecological footprint, with green on its roof, a clever sun-protected aluminum facade, a greywater recycling system and a set of geothermal wells to provide heating and cooling. But Li Hu sees the explicit environmental features as only a part of a building's ecological vision; it must also be useful and human, increasingly rare qualities in cities, especially booming Chinese ones where endless construction and traffic clog the streets and air. Keeping many functions within a connected complex (in this case, offices, shops, residences and a hotel in a building as long as the Empire State Building is tall) reduces the need for cars and helps to tighten the urban fabric. “If you create a space that works, there’s a potential for people to use it,” he says. And then the city, he says, "will not be doomed.”
See also Steven Holl's Whitney Water Purification Facility
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Terrible idea, for all the same reasons that Le Corbusier's Towers in the Park, were a bad idea. We don't want the building population to look inwards, we want them to look outwards. We want the building to be accessible by the rest of the city, to have shops and services that are used by the whole city, not by just the population of the building. This means street-level, street-oriented spaces.
And how is this space efficient?
With a general trend by Americans to move into gated communities in the suburbs, I think this type of building does have its uses. I think preserving the green space outside might be good.
Definitely a problem; from a structural engineer's standpoint, it's a nightmare. Not only will heating and cooling be a significant problem, but long suspended expansions create huge initial costs. Cantilevered sections are incredibly expensive. Furthermore, lateral loads (from wind, seismic) would be nearly impossible without making 'supercolumns' to support the building. Why not just build an entire city outside of a populated area (that would need suspended living)?
I glad China realising projects like this.
To live and work in the place where skyscrapers around completely impossible. A lot of people don't have enough money to live in suburb and everyday go downtown to work.
I'm not really sure how this is supposed to save space since the space below won't be usable for anything except parks and this long raised building would block other resident's views. I personally like the small businesses located at the street level at the bottom of the buildings. It really adds a lot of variety, action and closer social connection with the communities of the city. This building design is too isolated.
The building sounds neat, but the rendering reminds me a little too much of the Chung Kuo books by David Wingrove. The Chung Kuo series is a remarkably engaging series of books about a future in which Chinese super-cities have paved over the earth, in which good people do really bad things and really bad people do good things...
Or like the Caves of Steel book in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.