High Tech Park, Heavy Industry Zone

The opening in 2006 of the new deep sea port at Yangshan, south of Shanghai, brought rapid development of traffic infrastructure, free port zones, heavy industry zones and logistics centers to the new city of Lingang.

With its coloured facade, the new High Tech Park hopes to symbolize the development potential of Lingang's Heavy Industry Zone. The simplest building method in China was chosen - concrete skeleton covered with masonry and plaster. An ostentatious large-format paint coat in white and deep blue was added as a design feature. Large-format coloured surfaces produce a sense of depth, distance, proximity as well as strong structural contrasts. Blue and anthracite horizontal bands on white surfaces create contrasts and clear graphic lines that in turn create a sense of perspective on the long factory facades. Where it appears in architecture, blue is an explicitly unnatural colour. It is not a material colour, but rather a deliberate effect. Blue relates to the colour of the sky - in Lingang this is often a hazy gray, but under favourable wind conditions a radiant blue emerges, streaked with white clouds and wisps of vapour floating in from the sea.