Shenzhen has never been about the past – and in the new Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, set in a city younger than many of its inhabitants, there is a delicious irony in the project presenting itself as even remotely ‘ancient’. It is an irony that deepens when, viewed against the International Style glass towers of the Houhai financial district in the background, it is also the most futuristic building around.
So far, Shenzhen’s story has been vertical, both in its architecture and its ambition. It is a glittering arc of towers, totems of speed and economic might in the city where modern China first opened to the world.
Discover the new Shenzhen Bay Culture Square by MAD
Shenzhen is no longer the world’s factory and, edging away from its second coming as China’s Silicon Valley, it seeks to become a cultural powerhouse in the emerging Greater Bay Area, a sprawling metroplex of 11 cities and nearly 90 million residents whose economy rivals that of several major nations.
A hop and a skip from the AI museum being built by Tencent (Shenzhen is still home to tech giants like Huawei and BYD), the latest project by Beijing studio MAD, the 18.8-hectare Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, falls squarely into that new ambition.
Located on the western waterfront, the vast mixed-use cultural complex houses museums, performance spaces, shops, and public amenities beneath a series of flowing forms that rise and fall like topography. Less an object inserted into the skyline than a landscape, it is designed to evoke the appearance of rocks emerging from receding water.
It is the latest, and perhaps most complete, expression of MAD founder Ma Yansong’s vision of the (re)integration of nature and urban life, which he has explored in various forms for the last two decades under the rubric of the ‘Shanshui City’ – an 'idealised Chinese worldview' that proposes an urban space where residents can seek refuge in nature and sites that appear like they have always been there – an 'ancient future'.
MAD’s early work exudes a science-fictional quality. That sense of theatre remains in the curving confines of the Shenzhen Bay Culture Square, where spaces are linked by courtyards, organic openings and elegant ranks of cantilevered escalators. The echoing exhibition hall at the top of the northern pavilion, for example, is a work of such breathtaking dimensions that its low-lit simplicity is almost religious in nature. Elsewhere, the brilliantly lit lecture theatre that materialises at the end of a warm, winding corridor of wood is instantly reminiscent of that all-white room at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
But there is also a new maturity here. The studio’s characteristic mastery of movement is cleverly expressed in the shifting orientation of the stonework, small blocks that not only make possible the cladding of these mathematically complex forms but discreetly disguise their monumentality. But where previous projects such as Mississauga’s Absolute Towers or the Harbin Opera House verged on the alien, their sculptural, flowing forms a rude salute to the rectilinear logic of the modern city, the soft curves of Shenzhen Bay Culture Square read more as an invitation.
It seeks to choreograph public life, drawing visitors onto its roofs and terraces and down to the waterfront
Designed as a link between city and sea, it is not simply a monument but rather a piece of public infrastructure. It is not an object to be admired but instead seeks to choreograph public life, drawing visitors onto its roofs and terraces and down to the waterfront.
This dedication to the public realm reflects Shenzhen’s latest phase as a city moving beyond building 21st-century infrastructure to building memory. It also speaks to China’s contemporary cultural ambitions, where flagship public buildings are increasingly required to offer more than high-tech galleries or auditoria and are expected to become destinations, landmarks, and pieces of urban theatre, capable of projecting national confidence both domestically and internationally.
Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of the project is that, despite its power and scale, it does not seek to dominate its surroundings. Instead, and in what may be its most radical gesture, it attempts to dissolve into them.
In this city defined by verticality, MAD has produced something that invites residents not to look up, but to wander across, around, and through.
