Shanghai, China
Anchoring the southeast corner of the Taopu Smart City, Hero Tiandi, a collaboration between Ennead Architects and landscape architects Design Land Collaborative, is a mixed-use campus comprised of fifteen existing structures from the HERO Fountain Pen factory and several new additions.
Taopu HERO Innovation Hub was recently awarded with a 2020 American Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
The newly designed development draws on the historical tradition of clustered, interconnected factory spaces to create a distinct architectural character for the new campus.
The scale and craftsmanship of the original buildings, which provide a connection to the site’s history, complement the modern mid-rise and high-rise architecture, which offers inspiration for the character and quality of its future, suffusing Hero Tiandi with a novel energy and excitement.
Hero Tiandi’s low-rise buildings are reincarnations of the historic architectural language created with new materials and contemporary detailing.
The typically long and narrow factory buildings have been reimagined as interlinked clusters that provide flexible office space with permeable retail on the ground floor.
In addition, a series of stand-alone office “villas” punctuate the landscape, presenting the opportunity for smaller-scale retail with active, transparent facades that spur pedestrian activity, strengthen the identity of the urban block, and animate the ground plane.
Hero Tiandi’s variety of retail programming encourages building occupants and community members to activate the space differently over the full course of the day, resulting in a continuously bustling urban community.
The unique mix of buildings was designed to create a finely-scaled, urban campus defined by walkways, lush landscape gardens, and small civic plazas that serve sustainable and humanistic goals.
Collectively, the buildings provide comfortable work environments with pedestrian paths that link the surrounding natural landscape, architectural forms that encourage cross-ventilation, and building massing that maximize views to the adjacent park.
In addition, intimate roof terraces throughout Hero Tiandi provide outdoor social gathering space and accentuate the buildings’ multi-levels connections to the natural world and each other.
Nestled inside the pedestrian-focused environs, the historic Factory Building has been reimagined as the Taopu HERO Innovation Hub, which stands as a landmark example of the new developments’ sensitive design aesthetic as well as the government’s initiative to incorporate China’s rich industrial past with the rapidly-evolving technologies that are driving its future.
The Taopu HERO Innovation Hub’s central position and unique architectural features make it an ideal focal point for the campus.
Its dramatic, sky-lit atrium provides a new public space for social and professional gatherings in the Hero Tiandi, and its mid-rise volume functions as a transitional link between the delicately scaled factory campus and the high-rise office towers located on the south block of the site.
The towers, though several times larger than the existing architecture of the site, were designed according to the same trabeated language as the historic campus and evolve into refined crystalline volumes as they soar upward.
Rising to 18 and 28-stories, Hero Tiandi’s two tallest office towers situate the development within the Taopu Smart City campus as well as the broader skyline of Shanghai to ensure that Hero Tiandi becomes both a local and city-wide landmark.
Project: Taopu HERO Innovation Hub
Architects: Ennead Architects
Design Team: Peter Schubert, Kevin McClurkan, Wenny Hsu, Kevin Hamlett, Lynn Zhang, Charles Wolf, Robin Liu, Matt Hitscherich, Jazzy Li, Cameron Livdahl, Jae Ryong Oh, Patrick O’Neill, Lanxi Sun, Shuoyang Wang, Yixuan Wang, Lingxiao Xie, and Ricky Zhai
General Contractor: Shanghai Rongying Real Estate Limited
Client: Shanghai Lingang Taopu Smart City Economic Development Co., Ltd and LDI: Tongji Architectural Design (Group) Co. Shanghai
Landscape Architects: Design Land Collaborative Ltd.
Photographers: Ennead Architects
