Colliding tectonic plates, deep canyons, craggy overhangs, and other heroic topographic features are often evoked in the architecture of Morphosis, the Los Angeles-based firm. But the architects’ first project in China, Giant Group Pharmaceutical Campus, has allowed them to push that exploration even further, says Morphosis principal Thom Mayne. “In China, you can do things formally you just can’t do in the U.S.—aggressive, uncompromised, out-there ideas.”
Sited on 3.2 hectares in Shanghai’s western outskirts, Giant’s new corporate headquarters, slated for completion in April 2009, is a single-structure “campus”—a sinuous 24,000-square-meter building with myriad and, in some cases, separately articulated components. Most prominently, a long, curving office element, spanning a four-lane highway, bridges the so-called East and West Campuses, culminating in dynamic cantilevered ends, 33 and 38 meters long. To either side of the road, this complex building undulates in and out of a highly sculpted landscape, amid existing canals and a new manmade lake.
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