Earlier this year, Diller Scofidio + Renfro unveiled a sprawling new home for the Juilliard School in Tianjin, China. But a Chinese project begun a decade earlier–a live-work campus in Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone–is still under construction. The project, a mega-building of almost one million square feet, is the brainchild of Li Jing Zhou, owner of the handbag company Dissona. Hoping to use design to improve the plight of Chinese workers, she sought out the New York architecture firm. Partner-in-charge Charles Renfro made almost a dozen visits to the site, which, he says, is surrounded by a vast expanse of dreary factories and rudimentary workers’ housing.
He and Zhou developed a scheme in which the various strands of the Dissona operation–design, management, manufacturing, as well as living quarters for 3,000 workers, and entertainment, dining, and recreational facilities–would be woven into a single complex. The mammoth building is almost a diagram of the company’s parts, with voids becoming landscaped courtyards. The client completed the exterior of the concrete-framed building and built out parts of the interior, some of which are now in use, before declining sales forced a construction slowdown.
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