The Shenzhen Bay Super City Masterplan International Competition desired a new 170 ha financial district for Shenzhen, that would create a high tech green hub, a new iconic center similar to London’s Canary Wharf or Paris’ La Defense. We are witnessing an increasing number of competitions that desire new focus points aimed either to rejuvenate already popular cities, or to pun more unknown cities on the architectural valuable map of the world.
Courtesy of Urban Future Organization and CR-Design
The brief stated that the proposal had to contain three high – rise structures, green space connecting the insertion with the surrounding city and cultural units. The winning entry comes from Urban Future Organization and CR-Design in collaboration with a small team of experts from the Chalmers Technical University and it is called Cloud Citizen.
Cloud Citizen is a proposal that went beyond the theme and the limits of our imagination when it comes to urban areas – it is a 680 giant, almost compact structure, consisting in cloud-shaped skyscrapers. They are interconnected through sloping bridge-type elements, which also contain functional public spaces, each of them unique and creating the illusion that they are seamlessly floating over the green areas.
Courtesy of Urban Future Organization and CR-Design
This mega structure is divided into smaller modules, in order to serve a larger number of functions, such as commercial, cultural or recreational spaces, each of them being connected to the large park required in the competition brief. The solution also has a very eco-friendly aspect, with its production of power from solar, algae and wind sources, rainwater harvesting and air pollution filtration.
Cloud Citizen is certainly a new way of designing a city, an iconographic hybrid that brings together the imposing silhouette of a sky scrapper, the functional multitude of your average urban hub, the best sustainability features today’s technology has to offer and the amazing aesthetics generated with current digital tools available.
Courtesy of Urban Future Organization and CR-Design
By:Lidia Ratoi
