The studio Guallart Architects, together with a team of international experts, has won the First Prize in the competition organised by the Government of Shenzhen. 

Vicente Guallart, IAAC founder and former chief architect of the city of Barcelona, has won the first prize to design a new model for the next generation of green cities in China. The winning project will become a reality in Shenzhen’s new urban centre, technological capital of China, in the district of Xianmihu.

The project is a sample of how the cities of the future will be based on the principle of the ecological, dense and compact city where new technologies make the public space more human and natural by fusing green corridors and innovative economic activity of high density. Guallart competed with fifteen teams of international architects including Bernard Tácheme and Daniel Libeskind.

Finally, the jury awarded three First Prizes to Guallart Architects project, along with James Corner and the Shenzhen Institute of Architecture. The Shenzhen Planning Institute is already developing the final phase for urbanization, after which infrastructure construction will begin. In addition, Guallart Architects firm is already collaborating with the Shenzhen Planning Institute on other projects.

ABOUT THE PROJECT

The project, led by Ali Basbous, Honorata Grzesikowska, Yang Lei and Guallart, will begin construction in 2020 and it covers 2 million square meters where a new business centre will be developed including housing, offices, shops and services. A central park will be the meeting point of the spaces, with a new ecological corridor, created with two large wooden platforms connecting the sea and the mountains, leaving the traffic at the bottom and allowing the inhabitants to have a zone free of vehicles.

The district icon will be a 200-meter-high artificial mountain with a wooden and tree facade that will include a convention centre and a hotel. The project also includes the recovery of an urban lake around which new forms of ecological leisure will be built such as an eco-gastronomy area, a space dedicated to urban agriculture, a multifunctional sports complex and an environmental education park for children. This area will also install a roller coaster that will be turned into a drone competition centre.