Location: Shanghai, China

Client: Zhangjiang Group

Time: 2015-2018

Gross Floor Area: 158,626 sq m

Type: Office & Headquarters, Research & Development

Architect: EID Architecture

Design Principal: Ping Jiang, FAIA

Design Team: Sean Lu, Tina Fang, Kai Ding, Xinyi Lu, Shiyu Zheng, Ruoyun Ni, Wei Zhang, Dan Tang, Qiyuan Ding, Qing Zhang, Zhongzhou Jiang

Consultants:

LDI: Shanghai Johnson Architectural & Engineering Designing Consultants Ltd.

Photograph: Yijie Hu, Alex Ai 

Zhangjiang Artificial Intelligence Island is located at the east of Wisdom Island in the Zhangjiang Central District, Shanghai, occupies an area of 158,626 square meters. The Chuanyang River and Zhihui River frames the site, which is adjacent to the Zhangjiang Future Park on the west. It consists of a number of Research & Development office blocks with various sizes ranging from the small-scale buildings, to the medium-scale affiliated building, to the large-scale multi-storey buildings with sizes of 1,700 square meters, 6700 square meters and 16,000 square meters respectively.

The site, which is used to be a rather empty suburban field of the outskirt of Shanghai, has become the largest area that is occupied by headquarters recently. The rapid urbanization indicates a trend of Zhangjiang being an industrial center of research & development to host diverse companies in the near future as it shows in the ‘2035 Masterplan’ of Shanghai. The area is continuously vitalized by civil charm and innovative qualities within the growing community, which greatly contributes to the formation of the Innovation Park that specializes in Research and Development. Our design has shown the foresight and ambition to make the project area a pleasant and unique place as well as giving the premise of its sustainability.

Our design is intended to emphasize on exploring a reasonable solution of transforming industrial land into office zone as the crucial part of urban optimization of public space. It creates a science and technology centered community with a regionally-diverse office atmosphere. The newly built innovation park expands the cityscape in the form of an urban tribe to invite reconsideration of the relationship between solid (building) and void (environment) in a broader sense.