Architects recycle Chinese factory into a ‘new-old’ structure, with a community green roof and office space for creatives

Dutch architects MVRDV turned an old factory building in Shenzhen into the Idea Factory, an open-office environment that meshes with the urban village around it
Features include a public staircase and community-oriented rooftop bamboo garden with a climate agenda

Urban planning

Herbert Wright

Published: 7:15am, 22 Feb 2022

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In Shenzhen, 24 metres (80 feet) above a 1,700-year-old southern China neighbourhood, a rooftop bamboo garden has been designed for visitors to bounce on trampolines, swing in hanging chairs, dance and much more.

This public space is the icing on the cake of the Idea Factory, a new office building that developer Vanke commissioned Dutch architects MVRDV to craft from a plain old factory building.

Their design formula was to create a contemporary open-office environment that simultaneously opens out to urban village life.

Winy Maas, MVRDV founder-partner and leader on the design, says: “We have created a package of encounters.”

Winy Maas is a founder-partner of Dutch architect firm MVRDV.

In the 1980s, Shenzhen’s explosive spread engulfed older settlements, including Nantou, a walled urban village in Nanshan district that had twice been a historic regional capital. A clothing factory complex was built there and operated until this century.

The Idea Factory reuses the complex’s largest building, which Maas describes as “quite a symbol”, but the project is not MVRDV’s first acquaintance with it. In 2017, the complex hosted the UABB Urbanism\Architecture (Bi-City Biennale) Shenzhen, and the Dutch architects exhibited both inside the rectangular five-storey building and outside it with an installation called (W) ego, a nine-metre-high box of colourful, habitable rooms.

The Idea Factory in Nantou, a walled village swallowed up by rapid urban development in Nanshan, Shenzhen.

MVRDV’s new project retains the factory’s concrete structure and adds a sixth floor, but strips away the facade to create sheltered walkways, or loggia, all around. The concrete was cleaned and repaired, and through the heart of the building the architects threaded a public staircase, straight and lined with mirrors and jazzy neon lighting in English and Chinese.

“It is for sure an Asian reference,” says Maas, who professes a love for streets in Hong Kong and Shenzhen that have retained these illuminated staples of the past. The stairs switch direction halfway up, “pop[ping] out in a median point where you can look out over the street”, he adds.

The new, rounded, wood-clad landing with a balcony above is, literally, a stand-out feature.

A rooftop bamboo garden has been designed for use by the public.

To top it all off, the roof becomes a public space, divided by a maze of living bamboo. This is “a typhoon-proof green roof [using] new techniques of watering. [It] not only has a social agenda but also a climate agenda. It’s like a cushion on top,” he says.

The bamboo creates a set of “rooms”, each offering something different. Some are open to the sky, like those with sunbeds and hanging chairs, and others house pavilions that serve as a teahouse or a performance space.

In addition to the Urban Research Institute of Vanke China, Idea Factory’s occupants are from the design and creative industries, including theatre, opera and film animation. There is even a vinyl record shop.

These businesses and facilities bring new life to the urban village, crucial in Shenzhen, where development has wiped out others. But there are always possible repercussions to gentrification, social tension being one.

The new, rounded, wood-clad landing with a balcony above is, literally, a stand-out feature of the Idea Factory.

“Gentrification is double-sided,” Maas says, acknowledging the predicament that could face the less well off. “We wish that cities become a little bit busier, we want to have more wealth. It’s [also] very good that the city has different kinds of people. [But] the warning that you pick out for poor people, that’s a threat and I completely agree.”

The Idea Factory is not the first concrete industrial building transformed by MVRDV. Hong Kong’s 14-storey 133 Wai Yip Street in Kwun Tong, Kowloon, was similarly stripped down and opened up as flexible offices in 2016. Maas says that the structure of unloved, “dilapidated” buildings like this is “technically not the best”, but renovating bad concrete shows the history, so that “it becomes heritage, it’s somehow cool”.

Behind 133 Wai Yip Street is a dark backstreet, and MVRDV had to persuade the developers to install glazing, allowing the offices to “light the alley in the evening, so it becomes a social space”. That has a parallel with the Idea Factory, because its outward-looking loggia connects to the vibrant street life of Nantou’s surrounding alleys. “It has a social component,” Maas says.

The bamboo on the building’s roof creates a set of “rooms”, each offering something different.

The Idea Factory can also claim green credentials, not just because its roof brings some biodiversity to Nantou but also because greenhouse gas emissions are saved by not replacing old structures with new. The Idea Factory, he says, “shows that the hyper-new city of Shenzhen is entering its phase of reusing and renewing old buildings and turning them into the new-old”.

Maas believes that Hong Kong can learn from Shenzhen in areas such as planning, which is more liberal and open to experimentation north of the border. But his experience of Wai Yip Street was applicable to the Idea Factory, and provided lessons going the other way.

It’s just one example of how Maas sees the cities playing “a kind of urbanistic ping-pong game to learn from each other”.

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