In the recent World Architecture Festival China (WAFC) awards, Benoy won Outstanding Design Award of the Year for Alibaba’s Central China Headquarters & Industrial Community Project. We extend our congratulations to the owner, Alibaba Group, and to the Benoy design team.
The World Architecture Festival (WAF) is one of the largest and most prestigious events in the international architecture calendar. The World Architecture Festival China (WAFC) is the only independent event officially authorised by WAF. Upholding WAF’s academic spirit, selection criteria and evaluation system, the WAFC Design Competition will transfer the WAF’s Igloos Selection online, with the presentation taking place in the form of a webcast. The international judges will consider participants’ design presentations and rationales, selecting the winning works on the basis of design aesthetics, functional layout, social value and sustainability.
Alibaba Central China Headquarters & Industrial Community Base
Alibaba Central China Headquarters and Industrial Community, for which Benoy provided master planning and architectural design, is located in the core area of Wuhan’s inner ring. The goal is to create a smart industry cluster that integrates talent, entrepreneurship, jobs, industry and lifestyle. The project has a floor area of approximately 300,000 square meters. Two ecological office towers, one 280 meters high and the other 190 meters high, with a total area of 210,000 square meters, are planned for construction along with a new retail business hub, which has an area of 90,000 square meters. The project is set to implement Alibaba’s Digital Twin industry concepts, drive the transformation of offline businesses, and enhance Alibaba’s influence in Central China. It will be home to Alibaba’s economic systems and industrial ecology enterprises, along with new retail and other forms of business.
As part of its work, Benoy proposed the innovative concept of ‘AliCampus’. This concept was informed by in-depth research into Alibaba’s corporate culture and shaped by the company’s need to improve interaction between its office industry and business. While bringing new approaches to traditional commercial functions, Benoy has helped to create additional space to cater for future customers, injecting vitality into highly homogeneous urban projects. In terms of the architectural configuration, spatial units within the campus have been interlocked, nested, and reconstructed in a three-dimensional way, with reference to the compositional technique of the ‘Kongming lock’. Within the design, a changeable and dynamic public space has been formed by taking Ali HUB office and business space as the high-level horizontal lock; at the same time, the new business needs of Internet companies, and the functional needs of actual B2B and B2C space, have been fully integrated. And finally, grey space between commercial areas and the project has been limited, thereby achieving a unique urban tone and character.
