City Above the Clouds: A Vision of the Future

gad's Multifunctional Office Design Wins Golden A' Architecture, Building and Structure Design Award

The design inspiration for City Above the Clouds came from the idea of an ideal city and future community. The architects aimed to create a balance between life and work, encouraging people to communicate and embrace nature. The project focuses on openness, cooperation, and sharing, aiming to attract the youth from online to offline and provide a community living space. The combination of office and commercial businesses with the sharing of production resources creates a new way of working and living.

What sets this design apart from others is its unique conceptual planning system. The project features four main buildings stacked on double-storey circular commercial podium buildings, forming a central green park. The commercial space on the first floor has multiple entrances connected to the city, creating a vibrant, three-dimensional, and open ideal city. The large area of glass used for the building facade gives the buildings a sophisticated and humble feeling, further integrating them into the city.

The design is highly practical and human-based. The architects took into consideration people’s movements and feelings in the architectural space. The design includes different scales of space from large, medium to small. There are public, open, and shared spaces, such as the courtyard formed by 60-meter-high buildings, some 6x6m platforms for communication and exchange, and customized apartments to provide individual and private spaces for different groups of people.

The project faced several challenges, including the placement of many life scenes and functions due to site limitations and bringing natural sunlight to the 60-meter-high atrium. To overcome these challenges, the architects used a vertical greening system to connect multiple scenes and functions and worked closely with the structure engineers and curtain wall designers to deliberate on the structure and curtain wall components.

The project started in October 2017 and was completed in December 2020. It was awarded the Golden A' Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award in 2022, a prestigious accolade granted to marvelous, outstanding, and trendsetting creations that reflect the designer's prodigy and wisdom. These are venerated products and bright ideas that advance art, science, design, and technology, embodying extraordinary excellence and significantly impacting the world with their desirable characteristics.