Shenzhen, China
Located in the Longhua District of Shenzhen, The Cloud Commercial Complex is a 7,300 square-meter mixed-use commercial project near the Shenzhen North Railway Station designed by Yichen Lu from Studio Link-Arc with CAPOL Design.
Serving both the adjacent residential high-rises and the public, The Cloud invigorates a rapidly developing urban district and creates an iconic landmark that redefines the commercial experience.
For its innovative design and passive energy strategies, The Cloud Commercial 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.
Combining high-end retail spaces and cultural programs, The Cloud is a transformative indoor commercial street and an urban infrastructure that integrates nature and public amenities within the building and around the site.
By conceiving the roof as a continuous public garden, the project extends the park in front of the site into the building to create a new civic space that enjoys sweeping views of the city.
The sinuous roof gardens on top are coupled with continuous indoor retail spaces encased within a series of organic forms.
The shifting program plates are connected via bridges that take visitors through a series of unique spaces.
These spaces include open-air and covered exteriors that maximize seasonal use.
In order to respond to local climate, the building provides ample exterior public spaces and makes extensive use of exterior shading, passive cooling strategies, and planted landscapes.
As its name suggests, the Cloud is a dynamic structure that contains the tension between opposite directional forces, while visually levitating above the ground plane.
The form consists of six rotating platforms at different heights connected through bridges.
This linear configuration creates a clover-like series of spaces that spiral upward toward the roofscape.
Reaching the sky with every platform and bridge, the interior spaces combined within the sculptural form enjoy access to striking views of the city beyond that combine light, geometry, and materiality.
The singular design gesture combines expressive form and internal flows to propose a new typology for interior commercial space.
It rethinks traditional perceptions of retail space, its programs and functions, creating a new typology that is commercial, civic, and natural at the same time.
Project: The Cloud Commercial Complex
Architect: Studio Link-Arc, LLC
Chief Architect: Yichen Lu
Project Manager: Shiyu Guo
Project Team: Razvan Voroneanu, Zeynep Urgr, Yu Sun, Lingyun Yang, Zhenwei Zhong, Shucong Wang, Yoko Fujita
Architect of Record: CAPOL Design
Structural Consultant: HeZuo Structural Research Group
Curtain Wall Consultant: Studio Link-Arc +EFC Engineering
Interior and Landscape Design: Studio Link-Arc
Images Courtesy of the Architects
