Shenzhen, China
Located in Longhua’s Luohu District in Shenzhen, Luhu Cultural Center in Shenzhen China designed by Yichen Lu of Studio Link-Arc, LLC with CCDI and LxWxH+ASL Atson Landscape is a sprawling cultural center that harmonizes with the topography and adjusts to seasonal water levels.
The Luhu Scientific and Technological Culture Area is conceived as a cluster of cultural buildings aimed both at leveraging Longhua’s role as a technological and innovation center as well as elevating the quality of public life in the region.
A triad of public buildings–a theater, an art center, and a library–totaling 76,890 square meters (827,637 square feet) forms the centerpiece of the project, which also comprises a science museum and office buildings.
The Luhu Cultural Center has recently been awarded a 2022 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Located in Longhua’s Luhu District, the seventy-hectare site is wedged between an industrial area and the slopes of a nature park, fragmented by years of hasty urban development and unrestrained spillways from the nearby Hengkeng reservoir.
Instead of approaching infrastructural and ecological challenges separately from architectural design, the project advances a building strategy that employs architecture to transform the topography and spillways into public amenities and a new type of waterfront.
By dividing large program masses into their smallest components, the architects managed to “extend” the landscape over roads, restoring natural continuity, increasing the overall green area of the park, and creating a seamless transition between building and landscape.
The topographic organization of masses generates a series of discrete, interconnected public spaces cascading downhill and tied into a continuous loop that gives shape to a new spillway basin.
Reimagined as a civic waterfront, the basin edge is designed as a place in flux, where programming of public space changes with the fluctuating, seasonal water level.
The project intentionally breaks with conventional approaches to designing civic buildings as monumental objects in favor of a more diverse articulation of public spaces, reminiscent of traditional villages.
Taken as a whole, the looping waterfront village becomes a new public realm meant to reconnect the surrounding neighborhoods with the Hengkeng reservoir promenade, but also to contain future development along its edge and away from the park.
Project: Luhu Cultural Center
Architect: Studio Link-Arc, LLC
Chief Architect: Yichen Lu
Project Manager: Ying Liu, John Brewer, Razvan Voroneanu, Yanju Yu (CCDI)
Project Team: Zeynep Ugur, Xinning Hua, Xiaoxuan Hu, Lingyun Yang, Kenneth Namkung, Jiabo Xu, Furui Sun, Janice Chen, Zhe Cao, Haoming Li, Anna-Louise Duggon, Yoko Fujita, Uhn Choi, Dongyul Kim, Hyunjoo Lee, Feipeng Mei, Hang Li, Nikkita Klimenko, Lorenzo Rizzuti, Yue Wang, Yue Shi, Hyungsun Choi, Yibo Zhong
Architect of Record: CCDI (Shenzhen)
Interior Design: Yichen Lu, Ying Liu, Rong Li
Structure Consultant: CCDI + Buro Ehring Engineering P.C.
Curtainwall Design Consultant: Ihnhabit Group+ Essenz Architektur
Theater Design Consultant: Tefang Group
Acoustic and Stage Machinery Design Consultant: Acoustics and Theater Special Design & Research Studio of ECADI
Lighting Consultant: GLD Lighting Design
Landscape Consultant: LxWxH+ASL Atson Landscape
Photographers: Studio Link-Arc, LLC