Cube Design Draws an Ecological Corridor Between Two Shenzhen Hills with the Nankai Building

Most towers in Shenzhen's port districts face the water, the traffic and the skyline. The Nankai Building by Cube Design also responds to the hills on either side of it. Completed in 2018, this 82,126 m² institutional building rises from a site bounded by container terminals, industrial blocks and green slopes. That is an unusually literal mix of freight, density and landscape for a single plot.

The building is interesting for its argument more than its height or its glass. Cube Design's own diagrams frame the tower as a link in an ecological corridor between two hillsides. In that reading, the vertical building connects green ground rather than interrupting it. The available material doesn't show how far that ambition holds up in daily use, and we read the project with that limit in mind. The intent is clear and specific, though, and it deserves a close look.

A Tower Set Between Docks and Slopes

The aerial view explains the brief better than any statement could. A white-roofed mass sits among stacked containers, warehouse roofs and hazy water, with wooded hillsides pressing in from behind. The site is shaped by logistics, not leisure, and any green gesture here competes with cranes and truck routes.

This is where the project's premise becomes legible. A tower on this plot could easily act as one more hard object in an industrial grid. Cube Design instead treats it as a hinge between two remnant landscapes. That choice reorders the usual priorities of a commercial or institutional tower in a working harbor.

Balconies as a Planted Edge

The rendering shows the idea at human scale: stacked balconies with glass railings, set beside a vertical screen of climbing plants. A single figure stands on one level, looking out. The image is modest, which helps it. It shows occupiable outdoor edges with greenery a few steps away, not foliage draped across a facade for photographs.

Climbing plants on a screen are a more pragmatic choice than trees on cantilevered slabs. They need less soil depth, less structural allowance and simpler upkeep. If the built version follows this logic, the green layer becomes part of the facade system rather than a costly garnish. We would want to see how the planting has matured since 2018 before calling it a success.

Reading the Tower as Landscape Infrastructure

Taken together, the aerial photograph and the balcony rendering suggest a building that wants to work as connective tissue. It is meant to join the hills to each other across a district that has cut them apart.

That framing is worth taking seriously, and it is also easy to overstate. A planted facade alone does not make a habitat corridor. Continuity, plant species, maintenance and the ground plane all decide whether birds and insects can actually use the route. The project gives a strong diagram. Its real test is whether the green screen links up with planting at grade and on the neighboring slopes.

Plans and Drawings

The axonometric is the project's clearest statement. It places the tower between two hills and uses green arrows to trace an ecological corridor through the site, with a simplified section below. The section diagram strips the idea down further: one tall rectangular volume between two sloping green masses, with arrows running from each slope into the building.

These are concept drawings, not technical ones, and they are effective at that level. They make you read the tower as the middle term in a sentence that starts and ends in landscape. What they leave out is just as telling: how the corridor is built at each floor, and how it meets the street.

Why This Project Matters

Shenzhen has no shortage of green towers. Many of them treat planting as image, a softened skin on an otherwise conventional box. The Nankai Building is notable because its stated reason for greenery is territorial. It aims to reconnect two hillsides across a port landscape, not to decorate a facade. Even as a diagram, that is a more rigorous starting point than most.

For designers working on industrial waterfronts, the lesson is to start with what the site has lost and ask whether a large building can help restore it. Stacked balconies and a climbing screen are ordinary tools. Pointing them at a specific ecological gap is what gives this project its value as a case study, and its success should be judged on that basis.

Shenzhen Nankai Building by Cube Design. Location: Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. Area: 82,126 m². Year: 2018. Photography: 张超.

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