Giant Interactive Group | Morphosis
Corporate office buildings used to offer architects the chance to tap into fat construction budgets and make serious design statements. Today, only a few U.S. corporations are investing in significant architecture, and some (such as the New York Times) have been criticized for spending too much on it, while others (such as Bank of America) have kept quiet about their new buildings for fear of being criticized. Corporate China, though, is starting to flex its muscle and many of the new office buildings scream wildly for attention.
Yuzhu Shi, the chairman and founder of Giant Interactive Group, represents a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs, he had no interest in commissioning dull architecture. So he hired Thom Mayne from Morphosis to design a headquarters for the interactive, online games division of his fast-growing group of companies
When Mayne and his team first visited the site, they found farms and a flat landscape. Other architects might have seen a featureless setting, but Mayne envisioned the land playing an active role in the project. Working with the landscape architecture firm SWA, which had master-planned the 44.5-acre site as a parklike setting, Morphosis designed the building as a series of snaking forms burrowing under and through the land.
“When we showed the client the design for the cantilever, he asked, ‘Is it big enough?’ ” marvels Mayne, contrasting this bravado with the risk-averse approach of most American companies. “We couldn’t do anything like this in the U.S. today.”
The goal, says Mayne, was to “attack singularity” and echo “the messiness, the ad-hoc-ness that we love in cities.” Finding the right balance between “coherence and chance” was critical to during the design process. Mayne says he didn’t want to design “a perfume bottle,” a building as icon. Instead, he created a sprawling complex that captures the restless energy of 21st-century China.
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