Lenovo Global HQ

As Beijing has grown over the last 25-years, the city limits have pushed further out into the surrounding countryside. From what originated with the centuries old moat around the Forbidden City, the heavily congested ring roads now radiate out from the centre and connect the city of 22,000,000 people. Haidian District, which sits north-west of the fifth ring road is one of the designated high-tech precincts of Beijing and home to many of the China’s leading technology corporations.

This project was a competition submission for tech-giant Lenovo’s global headquarters in Beijing and was awarded second prize in 2012. Located on the perimeter of the Zhonguncun Software Park, the master-plan solution distributes the various campus elements over a rigorous orthogonal gird which allows for efficient vehicular, pedestrian and services circulation across the site and frames a network of landscaped external environments.

In a combined ‘response and reaction’ to a wide variety of architectural styles and themes prevalent across Beijing at the time, the architecture for the project proposed a paired back design strategy working in concert with a comprehensive sustainability agenda. High performance external envelopes combined with rational internal planning strategies to reduce the volume of material used on such a large complex, to an absolute minimum.