The new headquarters for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange (SZSE) has been completed in Shenzhen's Central Business District. The 180,000 m2 building is OMA's next completed building in China after the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing.

Synopsis of project

Defying the conventional building typology of tower-on-podium, SZSE's three-storey base is cantilevered 36m above the ground, allowing for a generous public space below and a lush roof garden on top. The raised podium contains the listing hall and offices of the Stock Exchange; in its elevated position, it can "broadcast" the activities of the stock market to the entire city.

While the generic square form of the tower blends in with the surrounding homogenous buildings, the façade of SZSE is differentiated through its materiality: a translucent layer of patterned glass wraps the tower grid and raised podium, rendering the façade mysterious and enigmatic, while revealing the construction behind. The façade changes continually with the weather, becoming a reflection of its environment.

The SZSE project was led by OMA partners Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, and associate Michael Kokora, in collaboration with partners Ellen van Loon and Shohei Shigematsu.
 

Rem Koolhaas: "The Shenzhen Stock Exchange embodies the Pearl River Delta's phenomenal transformation over the past thirty years. We are greatly excited about the building from an architectural standpoint, but I believe its true significance emerges when viewed in an economic, political, and ultimately social context. We are immensely honoured to contribute to Shenzhen's 21st century landscape."
 

 Night vision. Shenzhen Stock Exchange HQ by OMA.

The essence of the stock market is speculation: it is based on capital, not material. The Shenzhen Stock Exchange is conceived as a physical materialization of the virtual stock market: it is a building with a floating base, representing the stock market – more than physically accommodating it. Typically, the base of a building anchors a structure and connects it emphatically to the ground. In the case of Shenzhen Stock Exchange, the base, as if lifted by the same speculative euphoria that drives the market,has crept up the tower to become a raised podium, defying an architectural convention thathas survived millennia into modernity: a solid building standing on a solid base.

SZSE’s raised podium is a three-storey cantilevered platform floating 36m above the ground, one of the largest office floor plates, with an area of 15,000 m2 per floor and an accessible landscaped roof. The raised podium contains all the Stock Exchange functions, including the listing hall and all stock exchange departments. The raised podium vastly increases SZSE’s exposure in its elevated position. When glowing at night, it“broadcasts” the virtual activities of the city’s financial market, while its cantileverscrop and frame views of Shenzhen.The raised podium also liberates the ground level and creates a generouspublic space for what could have been what is typically a secure, private building.

The raised podium and the tower are combined as one structure, with the tower and atrium columns providing vertical and lateral support for the cantilevering structure.The raised podium is framed by a robust three-dimensional array of full-depth steel transfer trusses.

The tower is flanked by two atria – voidsthat connect the ground directly with the public spaces inside the building. SZSE staff enter from the East andtenants from the West. SZSE executive offices are located just above the raised podium, leaving the upper most floors leasable as rental offices and a dining club.

The generic squareform of the tower obediently blends in with the surrounding homogenous towers, but the façade of SZSE is different. The building’s façade wraps the robust exoskeletal grid structure supporting the building in patterned glass. The texture of the glass cladding reveals the construction technology behind while simultaneously rendering it mysterious and beautiful. The neutral colour and translucency of the façade change with weather conditions, creating a mysterious crystalline effect: sparkling during bright sunshine, mute on an overcast day, radiant at dusk, and glowing at night. The façade is a “deep façade”, with recessed openings that passively reduce the amount of solar heat gain entering the building, improve natural day light, and reduce energy consumption. SZSE is designed to be one of the first 3-star green rated buildings in China. 

The 46-storey (254m) Shenzhen Stock Exchange is a Financial Center with civic meaning. Located in a new public square at the meeting point of the north-south axis between Mount Lianhua and Binhe Boulevard, and the east-west axis of Shennan Road, Shenzhen’s main artery, it engages the city not as an isolated object, but as a building to be reacted to at multiple scales and levels. At times appearing massive and at others intimate and personal, SZSE constantly generates new relationships within the urban context, hopefully as an impetus to new forms of architecture and urbanism.

Text.- by OMA.

CREDITS.-

Project.- The New Headquarters for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange
Status.- Competition.- 1st prize2006. Completion: October2013
Client.- Shenzhen Stock Exchange
Site.- 39,000m2,in the downtown area of Shenzhen at the meeting point of the north-south axis between Mount Lianhua and Binhe Boulevard, and the east-west axis of Shennan Road, Shenzhen's main artery
Program.- Total 265,000 m2; 180,000 m2 above ground: Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s offices, Listing Hall, conference centres, a Chinese art gallery, a technical operations centre, canteen, and a restaurant/club, rental offices, a registration & clearing house, a securities information company, and a retail area; 85,000 m2 below ground.

Partners in charge.- Rem Koolhaas and David Gianotten, in collaboration with Ellen van Loon and Shohei Shigematsu

Associate in charge: Michael Kokora

On Site Team.- Yang Yang, Wanyu He, Daan Ooievaar, Joanna Gu, Vincent Kersten, Yun Zhang

Design Team.- Kunle Adeyemi, Ryann Aoukar, Sebastian Appl, Laura Baird, Waichuen Chan, Jan Dechow, Lukas Drasnar, Matthew Engele, Leo Ferretto, Clarisa Garcia Fresco, Alasdair Graham, Jaitian Gu, Matthew Haseltine, João Ferreira Marques Jesus, Matthew Jull, Alex de Jong, Santiago Hierro Kennedy, Klaas Kresse, Miranda Lee, Anna Little, Luxiang Liu, David Eugin Moon, Cristina Murphy, Se Yoon Park,Ferdjan Van der Pijl, Franscesca Portesine, Idrees Rasouli,Korbinian Schneider,Wolfgang Schwarzwalder,  Felix Schwimmer, Richard Sharam,Lukasz Skalec, Christine Svensson, Lukasz Szlachcic, Ken Yang Tan, Michela Tonus, Miroslav Vavrina, Na Wei, Xinyuan Wang, Leonie Wenz, Su Xia, Yunchao Xu,Yang Yang, Yun Zhang.

Competition team.- Konstantin August, Andrea Bertassi, Joao Bravo da Costa, Tieying Fang, Pei Feng, Katharina Gerlach, Carlos Garcia Gonzalez,Martti Kalliala, Klaas Kresse, Anu Leinonen, Anna Little, Jason Long, Beatriz MInguez de Molina, Daniel Ostrowski, Yuanzhen Ou,Mauro Paraviccini, Mendel Robbers, Mariano Sagasta, Bart Schoonderbeek, Hiromasa Shirai, Kengo Skorick, Hong Yong Sook, Christin Svensson, Xinyuan Wang, Dongmei Yao.

AMO.- Todd Reisz, Brendan McGetrick.

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Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) is an international practice operating within the traditional boundaries of architecture and urbanism. AMO, a research and design studio, applies architectural thinking to domains beyond. OMA is led by eight partners – Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, Ellen van Loon, Shohei Shigematsu, Iyad Alsaka, Chris van Duijn, Jason Long, and Managing Partner-Architect David Gianotten – and maintains offices in Rotterdam, New York, Hong Kong, Doha, and Australia. OMA-designed buildings currently under construction are the renovation of Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe) in Berlin, The Factory in Manchester, Hangzhou Prism, the CMG Times Center in Shenzhen and the Simone Veil Bridge in Bordeaux.

OMA’s completed projects include Taipei Performing Arts Centre (2022), Audrey Irmas Pavilion in Los Angeles (2020), Norra Tornen in Stockholm (2020), Axel Springer Campus in Berlin (2020), MEETT Toulouse Exhibition and Convention Centre (2020), Galleria in Gwanggyo (2020), WA Museum Boola Bardip (2020), nhow RAI Hotel in Amsterdam (2020), a new building for Brighton College (2020), and Potato Head Studios in Bali (2020). Earlier buildings include Fondazione Prada in Milan (2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), De Rotterdam (2013), CCTV Headquarters in Beijing (2012), Casa da Música in Porto (2005), and the Seattle Central Library (2004).

AMO often works in parallel with OMA's clients to fertilize architecture with intelligence from this array of disciplines. This is the case with Prada: AMO's research into identity, in-store technology, and new possibilities of content-production in fashion helped generate OMA's architectural designs for new Prada epicenter stores in New York and Los Angeles. In 2004, AMO was commissioned by the European Union to study its visual communication, and designed a colored "barcode" flag, combining the flags of all member states, which was used during the Austrian presidency of the EU. AMO has worked with Universal Studios, Amsterdam's Schiphol airport, Heineken, Ikea, Condé Nast, Harvard University and the Hermitage. It has produced Countryside: The Future, a research exhibited at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; exhibitions at the Venice Architecture Biennale, including Public Works (2012), Cronocaos (2010), and The Gulf (2006); and for Fondazione Prada, including When Attitudes Become Form (2012) and Serial and Portable Classics (2015). AMO, with Harvard University, was responsible for the research and curation of the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale and its publication Elements. Other notable projects are Roadmap 2050, a plan for a Europe-wide renewable energy grid; Project Japan, a 720-page book on the Metabolism architecture movement (Taschen, 2010); and the educational program of Strelka Institute in Moscow.

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Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944. He began his career as a journalist, working for the Haagse Post, and as a set-designer in the Netherlands and Hollywood. He beganHe frequented the Architectural Association School in London and studied with Oswald Mathias Ungers at Cornell University. In 1978, he wrote Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, which has become a classic of contemporary architectural theory. In 1975 – together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp – he founded OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture).

The most important works by Koolhaas and OMA, from its foundation until the mid-1990s, include the Netherlands Dance Theatre at The Hague, the Nexus Housing at Fukuoka in Japan, the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, the Grand Palais of Euralille and Lille, the Villa dall’Ava, the Très Grande Bibliothèque, the Jussieu library in Paris, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Seattle Public Library.

Together with Koolhaas’s reflections on contemporary society, these buildings appear in his second book, S,M,L,XL (1995), a volume of 1376 pages written as though it were a “novel about architecture”. Published in collaboration with the Canadian graphic designer, Bruce Mau, the book contains essays, manifestos, cartoons and travel diaries.

In 2005, with Mark Wigley and Ole Bouman, he was the founder to the prestigious Volume magazine, the result of a collaboration with Archis (Amsterdam), AMO and C-lab (Columbia University NY).

His built work includes the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Foundation Headquarters (2018), Fondation Galeries Lafayette in Paris (2018), Fondazione Prada in Milan (2015/2018), Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow (2015), the headquarters for China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing (2012), Casa da Musica in Porto (2005), Seattle Central Library (2004), and the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin (2003). Current projects include the Taipei Performing Arts Centre, a new building for Axel Springer in Berlin, and the Factory in Manchester.

Koolhaas directed the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and is a professor at Harvard University, where he directs The Project on the City, a research programme on changes in urban conditions around the world. This programme has conducted research on the delta of the Pearl River in China (entitled Great Leap Forward) and on consumer society (The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping). Taschen Verlag has published the results. Now is preparing a major exhibition for the Guggenheim museum to open in 2019 entitled Countryside: Future of the World.

Among the awards he has won in recent years, we mention here the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000), the Praemium Imperiale (2003), the Royal Gold Medal (2004) and the Mies Van Der Rohe prize (2005). In 2008, Time mentioned him among the 100 most influential people of the planet.

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Jason Long (OMA partner / OMA NY co-director) Jason Long is a Partner at OMA. He joined the firm in 2003 and has been leading OMA New York since 2014. Jason brings a research-driven, interdisciplinary approach to a wide range of projects internationally—from concept to completion, he served as the project manager for the Quebec National Museum in Quebec City and the Faena Forum in Miami.

A number of projects under his direction take a creative approach on the much-needed adaptive reuse and restoration of existing buildings, including POST Houston, the transformation of a former post office warehouse in downtown Houston into a mixed-use cultural platform, incorporating a new venue for Live Nation; the conversion of an Art Deco parking garage in New York City into a synagogue; the renovation of the Fitzgerald Building at University of Toronto into a new campus administration center; the adaptive reuse of Jersey City’s Pathside Building into museum for Centre Pompidou; and LANTERN, the conversion of a former commercial bakery into a community arts hub in Detroit.

Jason’s projects in urbanism and the public realm, particularly in Washington, D.C., public health, and equitable development at varying scales: a streetscape design for D.C. Convention Center, the 11th Street Bridge Park connecting disparate communities on either side of the Anacostia River, and a sports and recreation masterplan for the RFK Stadium Armory Campus.

His diverse portfolio extends to residential developments across housing types and regions in North America. Jason led the recently completed Eagle + West, OMA’s first high-rise towers in New York. In California, he oversaw the design and completion of The Avery in San Francisco and is currently leading 730 Stanyan, a 120-unit, 100% affordable housing building in historic Haight Ashbury. Currently in progress is The Perigon, a beachfront high-rise in Miami’s mid-beach neighborhood.

Jason previously served as a key member of AMO and was the Associate Editor of Content (Taschen, 2004).

Jason has lectured at SPUR, Urban Land Institute (ULI), AIA Conventions, and various museums and universities across the globe. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell University School of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP).

Jason holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Vassar College and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).
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