Foster + Partners to build China Merchants Bank HQ

Architecture studio Foster + Partners is designing another 350-metre-tall skyscraper for china merchants bank’s new global HQ in shenzhen, china. The skyscraper is the first building approved in the city’ new super headquarters district, aiming to unite the company’s 13,000 employees under one roof.

Rendering. China Merchants Bank HQ by Foster + Partners. Image courtesy of Foster + Partners

The design is complemented by a 180-metre-high luxury hotel and office mixed use tower, cultural and retail amenities, and green connections to the waterfront, the Shenzhen Bay Area.

The 310,000 square-metre office tower features large-span column-free floorplates that are supported by offset cores on either side. This unique structural solution maximises flexibility in planning the office spaces, while also allowing the building to be lifted up off the ground at ground level to create seamless connections with the outside. The glazed façade has been carefully designed to avoid downdrafts and make the open spaces on the ground floor more comfortable for pedestrians. The green plaza, lined with shops and restaurants, links to the waterfront, while the north side of the building provides a direct link to the metro. The podium level features a gallery area for art alongside sport and fitness facilities for employees.

The top of the building is open to the bank’s customers and invited members of the public, and are arranged around a quadruple height atrium, offering a gallery and event space alongside executive meeting and dining areas against the stunning backdrop of the Shenzhen Bay. The location of the split cores towards the east and west helps reduce solar gain and the rainwater harvesting systems will satisfy up to 70% of the water demand.

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NORMAN FOSTER

Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.

Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.

He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.

In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.

Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.