G6 twist building
Type: Office and commercial space Location: Beijing Client: Golden Star Real Estate Team: John van de Water, Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Wopke Tjipke Schaafstal, Bobby de Graaf, Chen Song, Guo Zhi Fang, Jia Yuan, Jao Peng, Xin Hong, and Li Jia Collaborator / associate: HAYA architects Floor area / size: 60.000 sqm Start building: November 2007 Status: Completed
Twist is a twin-building located near the East 5th ring road. The building will contain mostly service apartments. These apartments can accommodate start-up companies, which makes that the building has to blend between apartment and office building. The design-strategy follows three steps: projecting a typical NS orientated Beijing slab, rotating and finally twisting the slab in order to optimize daylight and view. The twisted slab is taken as a starting point to manipulate the buildings massing proportions, following the analogy that people prefer to live in a tower over living in a slab. Towards the new city street, the building will follow a smaller scale to enclose a square. Towards the South side of the site, the buildings will take on a more urban scale. To increase the diversity of the apartments, floors are proposed with three different window-heights. Metaphorically, the twin building resembles two dynamic Dragons encompassing a shining pearl.
Huihuang Plaza
Type: Shopping mall with office buildings Location: Beijing Client: Huihuang Real Estate Ltd. Team: John van de Water, Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Chen Song, Jiang Xiao Fei, Guo Zhi Fang. Jia Yuan, Xin Hong, Mo Lisheng, Yang Zhong Hui, Zen Zhao Ying, Yuan Duo, Ma Qin, Qin Qin, Zhang Rui, Su Yue, Wu Yun, Zhang Yu Hua, Lu Ming, Jiang Nan Collaborator / associate: HAYA architects Floor area / size: 180.000 sqm Start building: 2005-11-01 Completion: 2007-09-01 Status: realized
The Huihuang International Plaza is a building complex of 180.000m2 in size and accommodates shopping, offices, residential, conference, a hotel and parking. Four of the five towers were initially designed as office towers. Because of changing market conditions, three of the four had to change into residential towers over night. As a clause, the design had to be able to change back to offices before the building was completed. To anticipate on ever changing requirements, an architectonic concept is developed in which residential blurs with office. This ‘blurring’ makes both residential and office in representation possible. ‘Blurring’ is achieved by a changing relieve between stone and glass; the foundations of the buildings being more stone, the tops more glass. This pattern aims to visually dissolve the program, as well as the height of the towers. The architectonic concept is strengthened by economics: the higher the floor, the more view is offered, the higher the market value can be.
Waterstone Sales Center
Location: Xidan, Beijing Client: Meisheng Real Estate Ltd. Team: John van de Water, Bart Reuser, Marijn Schenk, Michel Schreinemachers with Wopke Tjipke Schaafstal, Bobby de Graaf, Chen Song, Yang Zhong Hui and Jia Yuan Floor area / size: 400 sqm Status: Completed
2007-10-01 Selling center of Xidan shopping nears completion
Water Stone is a high-end residential project located in the centre of Beijing. The assignment asked for a 400sqm so-called sales centre; an exhibition-like pavilion in which the apartments will be sold before they are actually built. The building has to accommodate private meetings like closing financial agreements and signing contracts while at the same time it has to seduce the public to enter. The building aims to express this ambiguous tension of simultaneously being public and private.
A standard rectangular building envelop is reshaped into an envelop that has three straight and two inclined faces. The reshaping creates a volume with two strong directions: one side seems to open up towards a street corner while the other side seems to close the building of. To emphasize the tension between public and private, the inclined elevations are executed in transparent glass while the straight walls are executed in a translucent double layered skin. Where the building opens up towards the public completely, a narrow casted view over a 1:100 scale model of the Water Stone is offered.
IBM office and research center
Location: ZPARK Beijing Client: Beijing Century Real Estate Team: John van de Water with Chen Song, Wopke Schaafstal, Lui Gui Feng, Li Gui Feng and Bart Reuser, Marij Floor area / size: 55.000 m2 Start building: August 2007
2009-08-27 Google Earth View 2008-05-10 Sneak preview 2007-11-10 Construction at full speed 2007-08-07 Construction started
This IBM research-office building is situated in a new, green IT-development zone in North-west Beijing. The given site is elliptical and according to the urban plan, buildings are to be single entities. IBM aims to provide a healthy working environment, as part of their vision to provide a productive environment.
To maximize the building area, the building envelop follows the site restrictions and therefore is elliptically shaped. To stimulate a healthy environment, the building aims to maximize its relations with its green surrounding landscape.
As such, the building consists of one two-story ellipse that rests on four smaller ellipses. The top two floors contain offices; the collective program is concentrated in the smaller ellipses.
The meandering space between the ground floor ellipses opens up towards the surrounding landscapes and accommodates the central lobby and three internal gardens.