Gold Architecture, Building and Structure Design · 2025
Shanghai Cloud Digital Intelligence Center
by FTA Group
- A' Design Award 2025 Gold Winner in Architecture, Building and Structure Design
- Awarded April 15, 2025
- CLIENT: FTA Group
- Estimated Number of Design Views: 81,893
- Verification code EFB0D044B8 · Verify this award
About Shanghai Cloud Digital Intelligence Center
Shanghai Cloud is a digital intelligence center located in the North Shanghai Hi-Tech Park in Shanghai. The complex consists of three towers with a total floor area of 270,000 square meters, and the tallest tower reaches 130 meters. Two towers are linked at the top by an aerial corridor spanning 63 meters. The project grows from the former Pengpu Machine Factory, where the original structure and the red brick facade were repaired and the roofs were replaced with metal and glass. Staggered cube volumes create terraces, sky gardens and outdoor courtyards.
FTA Group's Shanghai Cloud Digital Intelligence Center emerges as a distinguished exemplar of contemporary high-rise design that reimagines the tower typology through the ancient yet enduring architectural motif of the ceremonial gateway, a form that has signified passage, threshold, and civic welcome across countless cultures and epochs from triumphal arches to torii gates to monumental propylaea. The design achieves remarkable formal sophistication through the calculated asymmetry of its twin towers, their differing heights and proportions creating dynamic tension while the connecting sky-bridge establishes unity and frames a generous aperture that opens views through the composition to the urban landscape beyond. This portal void functions not as absence but as presence, an activated negative space that transforms the building into both object and frame, landmark and lens through which the surrounding metropolitan context is revealed and celebrated. The heritage-scaled podium structure rendered in warm terracotta brick provides essential scalar mediation between the monumental towers above and the human realm at street level, its curved rooflines and traditional material palette establishing dialogue with historical building typologies while remaining unmistakably contemporary in execution. The facade treatment demonstrates nuanced responsiveness to orientation and light, with the reflective curtain wall surfaces capturing the warm chromatic richness of golden hour illumination in graduated veils of amber and rose that soften the crystalline precision of the glazing system. Compositionally, the work participates in distinguished traditions of gateway architecture while advancing contemporary investigations into transparency, reflection, and the phenomenology of threshold experience, inviting viewers to contemplate how architectural form might simultaneously define space and dissolve boundaries between interior and exterior, building and city, present moment and historical memory.
Press Kit
- Unique Properties
- Located in the North Shanghai Hi-Tech Park, the project takes the new smart city as the core, and promotes the renewal of the region from industrialization to intelligence. Hundred meters high data center and 5A office building grow out from old Pengpu Machine Factory. The dislocation and occlusion of the architectural form creates more terraces, sky gardens and outdoor courtyards for the community, making the scene warm and allowing creativity to happen anytime, anywhere.
- Dimensions & Packaging
- The new building consists of three towers with a total floor area of 270,000 square meters, with the tallest one reaching 130 meters. The two towers on the west side are linked by a corridor at the top of 100 meters, spanning 63 meters.
After the completion of the plant renovation, the heavy industry workshop will cover an area of 16,000 square meters. The east side is 72 meters long, the west side is 78 meters long, the overall width is 122 meters, the average net height is 12 meters (18 meters at highest point), the large-scale building facade and the long-span steel concrete structure bring infinite possibilities for the internal space layout. - Tags
- Industrial heritage, Renovation, Smart city, Industry integration, Superimposedeffect
- Production Technology
- In order to reduce the impact of traffic, the high-rise buildings are arranged along the site boundary to create a complete urban interface and a staggered skyline. Two towers are linked at the top by aerial corridor to enhance the connection of internal spaces. Inside, the comfortable and pleasant street size is used to create a dynamic and warm science and technology community. Besides, for the old factory, the team adopts the scheme of the new into old, including reinforcement of original structure, red brick facade repair, replacement of metal and glass roofs, etc.
- Design Challenge
- Land in the key area of Shanghai that can be developed with a capacity of one million square meters is extremely scarce. In the face of the situation that the site is basically occupied by industrial relics, the design team creatively proposed the expansion concept from "square" to "cube". The scheme has been verified and affirmed by many experts such as the Municipal Bureau of Culture and Tourism, the Academy of Social Sciences, and the History Museum. As a result, the original structure and red brick facade of the old factory building were carefully restored, while incorporating elements such as modern curtain wall technology and glass roof to breathe new life into the historic building.
- Project Duration
- The project started in April 2021 and finished in June 2024 in Shanghai.
- Operation Flow
- Based on the different sizes and business characteristics of the enterprise, the design provides flexible and diverse office space to meet the diverse needs of startups to large. At the same time, it provides high-standard laboratory facilities for high-tech enterprises to support the research and development of cutting-edge technologies. In addition, apart from serving industrial development, the project also meets the multi-functional needs of reception, conference, exhibition, brand promotion and so on.
- Research
- Many successful cases in the United States show that the degree of wisdom determines its position in the future industrial ecology. In this case, the design team also regards "wisdom" as the soul of the park. From basic functions to intelligent industrial clusters, the logic of intelligent empowerment is consistent. In the meanwhile, the application of big data is cross-industry, so the project deeply integrates the upstream and downstream enterprises of the capital and the industrial chain, and creates a "high-density, high-level and efficient" innovation experience.
- Inspiration
- "Superimposed Cube", as the motif of architecture, runs through the design. The emergence of a digital intelligence center from the old factory is meant to bring this place the future productivity. In the meanwhile, the design cuts the buildings into flexible and harmonious cube blocks by breaking them into pieces, to avoid becoming isolated islands in the city. Each cube has a vertical community inside with a three-dimensional network, creating more casual communication spaces.
- Image Credits
- Image #1-5: Photographer Ai Qing, CreatAR Images, 2024