Imagine a long stretch of land with tall buildings lined along two sides. Two towers – connected through a canopy – front the two rows of buildings, acting as a gateway to the stretch that ends in a promenade. Welcome to One Excellence in Qianhai’s Central Business Centre, now under construction.
It was before Qianhai wasn’t making headlines that TFP Farrells, which is designing a part of the centre, had spotted the then untouched plot at the mouth of the Pearl River Delta. The international architecture studio is now shaping the prime area in the experimental zone for China’s financial reforms.
According to TFP Farrells’ director Stefan Krummeck, the special economic zone, which stretches over 15 square kilometres in Shenzhen’s west coast, is being designed to have little resemblance to Hong Kong or cities on the mainland. In Qianhai, people will have priority over cars.
“Usually in China you just have vast streets and huge pavements and you can’t even cross the street. That’s not human scale. I think Qianhai could become a model,” Krummeck said.
In his opinion, Qianhai “is interesting, because it’s dense, but it is divided into small lots and streets, so you still have that urban character”.
Qianhai’s density will be similar to Kowloon, but with a distinctive atmosphere. “Very often when we talk about towers, we end up sterilizing the city or sterilizing the groundscape. It can become a very harsh environment,” he said, citing Hong Kong as an example.