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Originally a commercial building, No.150 Chengfu Rd. faces Tsinghua University, China’s best technology institute. With the street’s rapid development into “Beijing Silicon Valley” and Beijing’s control over the increment of new buildings, old buildings are precious resources to be remodeled into new workplaces. This project is isolated from its surroundings: there is no public facilities nearby and its courtyard is filled by cars because of no underground garage. However, the building’s roof with excellent views provides a potential to vitalize the building in addition to functional office space. As a result, interior and exterior routes and spaces leading people to the roof social space plays a key motif in shaping the new facade.
The lack of workplace resources led most office buildings in this area to focus narrowly on maximizing the amount of office space. While these newly remodeled buildings have nice exteriors, they ignore workers’ humanistic needs. It is rare for office buildings to intentionally provide workers with a rooftop garden like this project. This gesture expresses that the people here are not only skilled as leaders in the high tech field, but also equipped with high touch facilities. Additionally, brick as the main facade material echoes the architectural characteristics of Tsinghua University’s campus, with which many workers here are associated. This material thus gives them a sense of belonging.
The transformation of old buildings for new functional needs is a sustainable strategy itself. The most prominent adaptive transformation of this building lies in its structural design: the entire new building has to be re-calculated to meet the latest structural codes due to a large amount of spatial adjustments. The original structure needs to be reinforced on a large scale, which would require the use of a large amount of material, resulting in unnecessary waste. In order to avoid these waste, the spatial layout has been optimized to an extent to keep the structural reinforcement per new code requirements to the most minimal level. This approach of balancing design creativity and code requirements is in line with the consideration of building’s eco-compatibility.
Unlike general buildings with generic exteriors, the facade of this building radiates vitality: rigid spandrel lines form a strong connection between the upper and the lower parts; a trapezoidal space housing a shallow four-story high lobby climbs up to the sky; the rooftop garden sinks two floors down from the top and opens itself on the horizontal plane by cropping out an up-side-down triangle from the facade. This composition forms a space that embraces both the ground and the sky while activating inside and outside spaces in relation to each other. Because the exterior is linked with internal functions, it becomes a meaningful element of the building, rather than a cliché of superficial decoration.
Additionally, the rooftop garden continues the facade’s use of bricks, integrating with the exterior to create a refined outdoor space. Beyond its social functions, the garden is also a spiritual place where those at the edge of technological innovation could relax and open their minds to wider questions of technology and human future without falling into secular traps.
All these efforts aim to make the space itself a driving force of productivity, encouraging young professionals to develop their talents by providing them with a personalized environment.
It is a cozy workplace that stimulates workers’ enthusiasm. To allow for a high-security interior and frequent external exchange, the first floor is designed as a conference center, where the largest conference hall cuts off a column on the ground floor to make a grand assembly area. This is a huge technical challenge, yet one does not feel the dramatic change. Overcoming many technical and humanistic challenges, this humanized workplace brings a unique lifestyle to the IT professionals.
WANG Hui is a founding partner of URBANUS. He is an architect licensed in New York State, a RIBA Chartered Architect, and a council member of the Architectural Society of China. He is also a studio master at the Architecture School at Tsinghua University and a visiting professor at the Center of Architecture Research and Design, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences. WANG Hui served as an editorial board member for The Journal of Architecture and other major academic journals. In addition to publishing many research articles on interpreting contemporary society with architectural view, he has also won numerous awards.
