Fuelled by more than £20bn of foreign investment, the city has swollen to house a population of 15 million. The skyline is a forest of skyscrapers; below them nestle private golf clubs and shopping centres devoted to luxury brands. "A new high-rise every day and a new boulevard every three" became Shenzhen's motto in the 1990s. Rice fields gave way to roads, lined with ever more fantastical buildings. It is now the biggest, most densely populated and fastest-growing city in the Pearl River Delta, the world's largest manufacturing megalopolis, home to 50 million people.
Today, the view from the 46th floor of Shenzhen's new stock exchange is filled with an endless army of towers. Dual-pronged spires and spear-shaped peaks thrust upwards into heavy skies. There are cliffs of curtain-wall glazing, rendered in metallic blues and greens, pinks and golds. The city already has replicas of the Taj Mahal and Eiffel Tower, its own pyramids and Sydney Opera House (all marshalled into the Window of the World theme park) – so where do you start with something like a stock exchange? What structure best symbolises the summit of all capitalist ambition, the pinnacle of former Communist party leader Deng Xiaoping's dream of wealth creation?
The architects hired to answer this £300m question are OMA, the Dutch practice headed by Rem Koolhaas and in China best known for Beijing's outsize CCTV headquarters, completed last year. Rather than compete with Shenzhen's proliferating skyline – which OMA partner David Gianotten describes as a "cacophony of shape-making" – they have elected to build something calmer and quieter.
At first glance the results are slightly nondescript: a 250m-high concrete office building punctuated by a monotonous grid of square windows. But get a little closer and you find that the podium, on which the tower would normally sit, has been hoisted 10 storeys upwards, where it hangs improbably above a public plaza.
The size of two football pitches, this gargantuan floating slab is now a breathtaking and decidedly menacing sight, glowering over the city like an alien spaceship come to deliver its final reckoning. In Gianotten's view, raising the podium "liberates the ground", while its looming presence "frames views of the city". How liberated the ground will really be at the foot of a high-security building remains to be seen; and if the podium frames the view, it does so by blocking out the sky.
The building's unusual, hoisted form has already earned it the local nickname "the miniskirt", something of an improvement on the moniker given to OMA's CCTV building: "the giant underpants". (CCTV HQ has also been likened to someone squatting over a toilet.)
But while CCTV's daring form was inspired by New York's Twin Towers, bent double to kiss in an implausible cantilever, Shenzhen stock exchange's look-no-hands gesture is a collage of two buildings by Mies van der Rohe. OMA's original 2006 competition entry depicted the strong horizontal slab of Mies's (unbuilt) Chicago Convention Centre impaled on the sleek vertical shaft of his Seagram Building. A surreal marriage of two archetypal forms, this Mies kebab had a compelling, absurdist simplicity, as Koolhaas explained in his original pitch: "As if lifted by the same speculative euphoria that drives the market, the former base has crept up the tower," he wrote. Now that it is built, it remains the ultimate example of building as diagram, a symbolic totem of capital – particularly given the fact that modern trading barely needs any space at all.
Founded in 1990, Shenzhen's is the third stock exchange in China, after Shanghai and Hong Kong, with around 1,500 listed companies (many of which remain state-owned) and a market capitalisation of £700bn. But gone are the days of frenzied men in coloured jackets shouting across a pit. "Contemporary securities trading is totally virtual," says Gianotten, as we walk around one of the echoing 15,000 sq m floors of the floating plinth. This three-storey sandwich, which is held up by a 27,000-tonne steel truss, will house staff offices and meeting rooms, as well as the building's real heart: an entire level of computer servers, their proximity to the traders essential given that deals are now done in nanoseconds. Elsewhere, there are a number of ceremonial spaces: a "listing hall" where new companies will be ritually welcomed with the ringing of a great bronze bell; and a private art gallery, to which each new company must donate an artwork.
It is these theatrical stage sets that OMA usually does so well – from the dramatic halls of its Casa da Musica in Porto, to the ornate private meeting rooms of the Rothschild bank in London. But here in Shenzhen, there is little of that wit and charm, that nuanced understanding of performance and ritual. Gianotten describes the stock exchange as a deliberately "generic tower"; these enormous rooms, crafted with a blunt corporate hand, make you wonder if OMA has taken that idea a little too far.
Unusually for a building of this size and location, the architects have had control over the entire project, even down to the scale of furniture, much of which has been designed especially. In the Orwellian-sounding Market Watching Department (a kind of mission control where 30 overseers will sit at a bank of eight screens to check for market irregularities), the monitors are set low in special V-shaped desks, allowing colleagues to see each other. On the floor above, desk cubicles are kitted out with napping beds that fold out of a filing cabinet, providing brief respite between shifts – another feature that recalls the working regime of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The tower above the podium houses leasable office space designed to lure high-end clients. The lobbies are lined with Italian marble, and there are double-height entertainment foyers inscribed with gold-leafed graphs inspired by market fluctuations. The summit is reserved for a VIP dining club, its banqueting halls upholstered with leather and raw silk; there are bamboo floors and aluminium walls, and views of a private roof garden planted on the podium. But once again, these spaces lack character or meaning, giving a bland sense of lobotomised luxury.
Down on the expansive plaza, the clouds have shifted to reveal the facade in a different light. The entire building, which reads as dull grey concrete on an overcast day, is in fact wrapped in a diaphanous cocoon of textured glass – the kind usually used to obscure bathroom windows. "It is the first time it has been used on this scale," says Gianotten, describing months of testing to achieve the desired finish (a three-layer panel of low-iron, ceramic-coated and textured glass sheets). This gives the building an enigmatic, alchemical air, changing its character throughout the day. When the sun comes out, the entire tower sparkles; at dusk it becomes an ethereal ghost; at night, it glows from within like a crystalline shell, as the latest stock market figures chase around the perimeter of the podium.
In the end, it is this that marks the project apart from its neighbours: a muted grey cadaver among a riot of mirrored facades and faux-stone panelling. As we leave, the building begins to dissolve into the haze. This seems fitting: OMA's hollow shell, built to house a largely virtual process, is eerie, tyrannical, arresting. But it also looks as if it might not be there at all.
Original Article
Source: guardian.co.uk
Author: Oliver Wainwright
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