Giant Interactive Group : By Morphosis

Shanghai, China
Morphosis
Post BY:Kitticoon Poopong

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--The executive portion of the office wing cantilevers 115 feet and extends above a lake.

Morphosis engages landform with architecture to create a new kind of workplace for Chinese capitalism. 
Corporate office buildings used to offer architects the chance to tap into fat construction budgets and make serious design statements. Think Mies van der Rohe and Seagram or Eero Saarinen and General Motors. Today, only a few U.S. corporations are investing in significant architecture, and some (such as the New York Times) have been criticized for spending too much on it, while others (such as Bank of America) have kept quiet about their new buildings for fear of being criticized. Corporate China, though, is starting to flex its muscle and sees architecture as a fine way of showing off its bulging profits. Many of the new office buildings rising in both urban and suburban China scream wildly for attention, but a few are taking more sophisticated — if no less bold — approaches to shaping the workplace and expressing the role of capitalism in a nominally communist society.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--Shared facilities such as a gym, pool, and hotel sit under a green roof (right in photo), while offices occupy an east wing of glass, steel, and fiber cement panels.

Flashy, famous, and fearless, Yuzhu Shi, the chairman and founder of Giant Interactive Group, represents a new generation of Chinese entrepreneurs. With his face on the covers of glossy lifestyle magazines and an executive suite stocked with female assistants who could model clothes in those same publications, Shi had no interest in commissioning dull architecture. So he hired Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis to design a headquarters for the interactive, online games division of his fast-growing group of companies, knowing full well that Mayne had made even the California Department of Transportation and the United States federal government look sexy in sleek new office buildings in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Although Giant had offices in a number of buildings in central Shanghai, Shi decided to build his new complex on the city’s outskirts where it could spread out.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--A combination of fiber cement panels and glazing offers views from offices while protecting them from the sun. A promenade lets employees walk along the lake.

When Mayne and his team first visited the site, they found farms and a flat landscape. Other architects might have seen a featureless setting, but Mayne envisioned the land playing an active role in the project. Since learning about Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and other “earth artists” in the 1980s, Mayne had designed a number of projects — including the Crawford Residence in Santa Monica (1990) and the Diamond Ranch School in Pomona (1999) — that dug into and engaged their sites. “Giant is the culmination of this train of thought,” states Mayne. “In all these projects, we tamper with the figure/ground relationship and turn the land into an active component.”

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--The bridge, which curves and slopes, presented an engineering challenge.

Working with the landscape architecture firm SWA, which had master-planned the 44.5-acre site as a parklike setting with a new lake connected to existing canals, Morphosis designed the building as a series of snaking forms burrowing under and through the land. Almost all of the western half of the building (containing shared elements such as an indoor pool, a gymnasium, and a hotel for corporate guests) sits below a 164,000-square-foot green roof, which reads from afar as a faceted hill or folded meadow. The east half of the complex (containing the general offices, executive offices, auditorium, cafe, and library) jumps over a highway bisecting the site and reaches out to the lake. In a dramatic flourish, the east wing cantilevers out 115 feet, hovering above the lake with a glass floor offering views of the rippling water below. 

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--A glass-floored conference room adds a dramatic touch to the executive suite.

“When we showed the client the design for the cantilever, he asked, ‘Is it big enough?’ ” marvels Mayne, contrasting this bravado with the risk-averse approach of most American companies. “We couldn’t do anything like this in the U.S. today.”

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--Conical forms mask columns in the hotel lobby.

While the enormous green roof, the lake, and a series of plazas and courtyards carved into the building offer employees ample opportunities to enjoy the outdoors, Mayne’s approach to nature is anything but naturalistic. “It’s an augmented landscape,” says the architect. He and his team designed the building as a “multiplicity of components” acting on and responding to the folded land, the highway running through the property, and major programmatic needs. The goal, says Mayne, was to “attack singularity” and echo “the messiness, the ad-hoc-ness that we love in cities.” Finding the right balance between “coherence and chance” was critical to during the design process.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--A reception area leads onto a plaza carved from the building’s sprawling form, part of a strategy to link a variety of outdoor spaces with indoor ones.

The 258,000-square-foot headquarters represents a new, magnanimous approach to employee relations emerging in China. Extensive recreational facilities and outdoor spaces reflect Giant’s strategy of using perks to attract talented staff, inspired by the approach used by Google and U.S. software companies. 

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--An indoor swimming pool is one part of an extensive fitness center open to all employees.

The steel-frame building took two and a half years to build and required some sophisticated coordination between the Morphosis team generating 3-D computer models and the steel fabricator in China. In some places — such as the curving, sloping bridge that spans the highway and connects the east and west wings — the design borders on the excessive. But the architects kept other parts of the building — such as the area under the green roof — fairly simple, in part to allow flexibility in how it is used. While Mayne’s attitude to landscape began as an artistic concept, it led him to a design that has important green benefits. For example, burying so much of the building in the ground reduces heating and cooling loads. In addition, an enclosed and ventilated (but not conditioned) walkway runs along the south side of the west wing, buffering offices from the sun, and a double skin on portions of the north facade also creates more temperate interior spaces.

Photo © Courtesy of Iwan Baan--A walkway along the office wing connects to a bridge spanning a highway.

Mayne says he didn’t want to design “a perfume bottle,” a building as icon. Instead, he created a sprawling complex that captures the restless energy of 21st-century China — a place that may have too much going on, but that nevertheless impresses us with its daring and its indomitable will to keep pushing forward.

ground floor plan--drawing Courtesy of Morphosis

second floor plan--drawing Courtesy of Morphosis

third floor plan--drawing Courtesy of Morphosis

section A-A & B-B--drawing Courtesy of Morphosis

The People Project Manager Tim Christ Paul Gonzales Project Architect Hann-Shiuh Chen Ted Kane Mario Cipresso (through Design Development) Project Designer Leonore Daum Project Team Andrew Batay-Csorba Adam Bressler Marty Doscher Patrick Dunn-Baker Graham Ferrier Chris Herring Debbie Lin Kristina Loock Yichen Lu Scott Severson Mohamed Sharif Suzanne Tanascaux Chris Warren Project Assistant Qing Cai (site assistant in Shanghai) Soohyun Chang Kyle Coburn Guiomar Contreras Laura Foxman Joe Justus Michelle Siu Lee Hugo Martinez Mark McPhie Brock Hinze Sunnie Lau Greg Neudorf Christin To Jose Vargas Dana Viquez Mike Patterson Nutthawut Piriyaprakob Aleksander Tamm-Seitz Kuo Wang (site assistant in Shanghai) Jing Xu Jian-Jia Zhou Design Institute MAA Engineering Consultants (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. Local Architect SURV (Shanghai) Managing Director: Alexander Moh Director in Charge: Thomas Chow Project Manager: Leo Huang, Mel Tang, Jie Zhu, MEP Coordinator: Hai-Tao Hu Structural Engineer Bao Ye MAA Engineering Consultants (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Thornton Tomasetti Group, Inc. (concept design) Mechanical Engineer IBE Consulting Engineers (concept design) MAA Engineering Consultants (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Electrical Engineer IBE Consulting Engineers (concept design) MAA Engineering Consultants (Shanghai) Co. Ltd. Interior Design Morphosis Landscape Architect SWA Group Local Landscape Architect TOPO Design Group Architectural Lighting Design Heather Libonati, LC, Luminesce Design General Contractor China State Construction Engineering Company 3rd Bureau

The Products Structural system: Steel Frame,  Concrete Exterior cladding: Description: Fiber-cement Panels Manufacturer: Swisspearl Product: Xpressiv Color: Dark Grey 8220 Area: Office Building Skin Roofing Description: standing seam aluminum metal roofing system Manufacturer: Corus Kalzip Color: Dark Grey  Area: Office Building Roof Door Hardware Description: Glass door Hardware and closer and locks Manufacturer: Dorma Product: Dorma SG Interior finishes Suspension grid: Description: Metal Welded Wire Mesh Ceiling Panel - painted Manufacturer: DEKO Product:  Custom Thickness: 1.5mm diam. Rods Paints and stains:   Description: Multi-surface Paint Manufacturer: Benjamin Moore - ECO-SPEC Product: Interior latex enamel Area: Gymasium, Hotel Entry Plastic laminate: Description: Plastic laminate Manufacturer: Wilsonart Laminate Product: Wilsonart ® Fire-Rated Laminate Thickness: 0.81mm ± 0.13mm Solid surfacing: Description: Solid Surfacing Manufacturer: Cesar Stone Product: Quartz coutertop Color: Blizzard 2141 Resilient flooring: Description: Rubber Rolled Flooring Manufacturer: GerFloor Product:  Color: Black Area: Gym, Dance Rooms Carpet: Manufacturer: Interface Flor Product: Menagerie 26Z Size: 610 x 610mm Color: Storm #4949 Properties: Antron Lumena solution dyed nylon 23 oz, Tufted Tip-Sheared Area: Open Office, Private Offices, Conference Rooms Raised flooring: Description: Modular Raised Flooring System Manufacturer: Lindner Product: Nortec – calcium sulphate panel Size: 600 x 600mm Special interior finishes unique to this project: Interior Ceiling reflective ceiling panels: Description: Custom light reflectors Manufacturer: COSA International PTE LTD Product: Barrisol Membrane Color: transulcent white Glass Fiber Reinforce Gypsum Interior Panels Description:  Wall and Ceiling finish panels Manufacturer: EGROW International Product: GFRG Color: White Interior Wall Paneling: Description: Fiber-cement Panels Manufacturer: Swisspearl Product: Carat Color: 7090 Ivory Properties: Integrally colored fiber cement panels Area: CEO Office Furnishings Manager Office furniture / seating: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Zody Color: Black Open Office furniture / desks: Manufacturer: Plan Moebel Series: m-pur / custom Color: White Open Office furniture / storage: Manufacturer: Onlead Private GM  Office furniture / manager seating: Manufacturer: Vitra Serie: Meda Color: White Private Office furniture / secretary seating: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Zody Color: Grey Private Office furniture / lounge seating: Manufacturer: Vitra Serie: Monopod (leather) Color: Avocado Private Office furniture / desks: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Allways Color: White Private Office furniture / desk storage: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Allways Color: White Private Office furniture / office storage: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Equipe Color: White Conference rooms furniture / seating: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Very Color: White Conference rooms furniture / tables: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Planes Color: White Break rooms furniture / tables: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Premise Color: White Cafeteria furniture / lounge seating: Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: M2 Straight, M2 Corner and M2 Flat, Round Color: Lime green and Anthracite Cafeteria furniture / tables: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Premise Color: White Cafeteria furniture / chairs: Manufacturer: Vitra Serie: Tom Vac Color: Translucent Library furniture / tables: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Planes Color: White Library furniture / chairs: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Very Color: White Library furniture / lounge: Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: Round Cake Color: White Auditorium furniture / chairs: Manufacturer: Hayworth Serie: Very Color: White Exhibition room furniture / seating Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: Infinity Straight XL Color: Lime green and Anthracite Reception furniture / seating: Manufacturer: Vitra Serie: Meda Color: White Hotel lobby furniture / lounge seating: Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: Round Cake Color: Anthracite Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: Round 2 Color: Custom (Benjamin Moore Tawn Day Lilly - 2012-10) Hotel bar furniture / seat pads: Manufacturer: Quinze & Milan Serie: [custom pads] Color: Custom (Benjamin Moore Tawn Day Lilly - 2012-10) Hotel room furniture Sofa/chairs:  Manufacturer: BoConcept Color: White CEO private hotel suites and loft / Lounge, tables and lighting: Manufacturer: B&B italia Manufacturer: MDF italia CEO private hotel suites and loft / desk and side chairs: Manufacturer: Vitra Lighting Downlights, Task Lights, Exterior lamps, pendants and soffit lighting Manufacturer: Thorn Conveyance Elevators/Escalators: Manufactuerer: ThyssenKrupp Elevator Plumbing Toilet, Urinal Manufacturer: Duravit Product: Starck Faucets, Showers fixtures Manufacturer: TOTO Hand dryer, towel dispenser Manufacturer: DLINE

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