The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habit reports that work has begun on the Bao’an Public Culture and Art Centre in Shenzhen, southeast China.
The scheme, which was first proposed in 2017, was to have broken ground last year, but this was postponed by the pandemic.
The Bao’an district is in the western suburbs of Shenzhen on the South China Sea coast. It has been the site of a number of new cultural buildings in recent years.
The 11ha masterplan for the culture complex, drawn up by Hong Kong-based Rocco Design, includes a library, cultural centre and a performing arts venue.
The Library and the Youth Palace and Cultural Centre were completed as part of the first phase.
The latest addition will take the form of a series of stacked boxes with a gross floor area of 94,000 sq m. There are planted terraces on all available horizontal surfaces, and a “sky lobby” will give views over Shenzhen and the bay.
The centre will house a museum, an art gallery, a 500-seat theatre, as well as an exhibition hall, conference venues and classrooms.
The centre, and the rest of the complex, will be served by a metro line and shopping streets.
Coldefy comments that the ensemble is meant to form a “living canvas”, which is “simultaneously an art object and a container for art”.
“The canvas splits, letting us perceive the skyline of the city … Geometry is manipulated from the inside; volumes are shifted, voids are filled with vegetation, and when the visitor comes in, the space becomes a living canvas,” it says.
The centre is due to be completed in 2026.
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