Intellectual Property Office Headquarter in Beijing, China by KUAN Architects [UCD]

Article source: KUAN Architects [UCD]

This project is located at the Beijing TBD, in the northern district of the city, at the crossing of the North-South axis of the Badaling Expressway and the East-West axis of the TBD.

The site is divided into five parcels on both side of the TBD’s main landscape axis. The site is peculiar in its irregular quadrilateral shape, while all other blocks along the sides of the axis are rectangular grid. While the frequent approach would be balancing a regular site with complex architectural forms, we choose to use simple and concise shapes to balance the irregular site and use buildings to enclose a square plaza in the center. In this way, we also achieved the planning principle of reconciliating with the regularly gridded urban texture along the TBD’s East-West axis.

• Architects: KUAN Architects [UCD]
• Project: Intellectual Property Office Headquarter
• Location: Beijing, China
• Author: Wang Kuan
• Design Team: Kuan Wang,.Dongchun Wang, Liang Xun, Mei Li, Lina Teng, Wei Liu, Feixiang Wang, Yue Zhao, Dong Guo, Yi Cao, Yanu Zeng
• Cooperation: XUN LIANG STUDIO (UCD, W&W STUDIO (UCD)
• Area: 140,500 sqm
• Status: Best Proposal to be design developed
• Scheduled completion date: 2017

Since the central square will be used as a public park, the challenge would be to lace together the five scattered buildings and make the whole an organized central-oriented space.

The design is inspired from the Chinese painting scroll. While the TBD’s landscape axis is seen as a shanshui painting, the scroll would be the building complex. Human activities activate the architecture just like ink and respiration adding life to a Chinese painting, and the whole complex unrolls like unrolling a scroll of painting. Annexed low-rises housed all service spaces connected to the office buildings. They are horizontal and their roofs are continuations of the central park, emphasizing on the movement of unrolling and offering relaxing and conversation spaces for the staffs. Using this continuous roof of the annex low-rises, corridors and running tracks could be created, extending the ground level’s green space and public space to create a system secondary green space on the roof. Employees working in the headquarter could work from their office building to the outdoor space on the roof, where they could follow the track to the green sky-corridor until the central park. The system of corridors in the air lace the complex together to the central square, as if enclosing the painting like the tie of the scroll.

The two main buildings are situated at the West and East end of the site, as an ancient pair of lock, insinuating the importance and the protection of intellectual property. The main body of the building acts to unlock the scroll and give access to the intellectual and the innovation. Once “unlocked”, the bureaucratic space fuses linearly into the painting, interrelating with the annex low-rises and the central garden space into one consistent and fluid spatial system.

Intellectual property is a relatively new focus in China and it’s getting more and more attention very quickly. This design of the headquarter is filled with traditional Chinese artistic and cultural insight, not only to pay homage to the ancient culture but also stating that cultural context is where intelligence starts.

Tags: Beijing, China

Categories: Headquarters, Offices

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