eKontrol HQ

Located in the new industrial area of Suzhou, eKontrol's main business is the motor assembly products of electric automobiles. As one representative of Chinese high-tech companies, the client expects the project to be both innovative and practical to nurture his corporate culture with humanistic working environment. The design needs to reflect visionary concepts for factory production, professional education, and employee wellbeing. Based on closely communication with the stakeholders and thorough inspection of the existing factory, we are committed to satisfy the need of eight user groups, i.e., employees, shareholders, management persons, staff family members, corporate friends, chain suppliers, corporate peers, clients, and VIPs. Another challenge is that besides the client’s own company, the factory also includes other companies as up-stream manufacture partners with strict and complex workflows from the processing of raw materials to product testing, the transportation, and storage of finished products. Each manufacture partner has its own warehouses and attached offices, where staff need easy access besides convenient connection to the shared space such as the Staff Club and R&D Center. Meanwhile, logistic circulation must be separated from pedestrians. The stereotype of front-shop and back-factory doesn’t work. It is necessary to create a new factory prototype that can maintain the separated and sequential workflow between different manufacture units while promoting communication and interaction between staff. Based on experimenting different massing variations, we discomposed the office and warehouse which are initially attached back-to-back and re-distributed the warehouses around a central void. Then each company’s office block is set as the opposite side of the corresponding warehouse and connected through elevated bridges over logistic roads, achieving the complete separation between vehicles and pedestrians. The staff club is designed as a square loop floating between the lobbies on ground floor and the office of each company above, then on the top floor stacked R&D center as a ring overlooking the entire courtyard. For the facade design, we simply increased the height of the main lobby by half story to accommodate an exhibition hall. This operation generates a series undulation to the rest of the office floors and produces oblique connections between different stories, forming several outdoor roof terraces and indoors multi-functional halls. The appearance of the HQ becomes a direct manifestation of the way how this building works. It is a natural whole of which its parts are fused together and produces spatial synergy allowing more human interaction and higher productivity. Walking into the courtyard, you will find the views are framed by the under-covered voids at each side of the façade and the circular R&D up in the sky. Together with the landscape, this architecture breeds a volumetric courtyard housing changing scenes over time, strengthening the relationship between colleagues, and promoting the corporate business. The goals set up at the beginning is finally more than fulfilled.