KPF Wraps a One-Kilometer Landscape Ribbon Around TP-LINK's Three-Tower Shenzhen Campus

Most office towers treat circulation as a cost: cores, corridors and fire stairs sized to code and hidden from view. With the TP-LINK LXD Building in Shenzhen, KPF makes it the main event. The 124,600 m² mixed-use complex, completed in 2026 for TP-LINK Technologies, splits its mass into two office towers and a dormitory tower over a shared retail base. A continuous landscaped ribbon, roughly one kilometer long, starts in the lobby and climbs, folds and wraps the central structure all the way to the crown.

This is the third building KPF has designed for the wireless router company, following the nearby Lianzhou Building, and it carries a post-pandemic brief: attract engineering and design talent by making the workplace something worth leaving your desk for. What interests us is less the green imagery, which is familiar in tall-building renderings, than the claim behind it. LXD argues that the ground plane can be lifted and stretched vertically without losing its public, wandering quality. The photographs suggest the argument mostly holds.

Three Towers, One Stacked Silhouette

From the street, the complex reads as a pile of offset glass boxes held between stone-clad cores, with white cantilevered slabs breaking the stack at intervals. Those white bands are the ribbon showing itself on the facade. They give a tall, dense composition a horizontal rhythm and make the outdoor program legible from a distance, which matters in a district where most towers present a sealed glass face.

The massing follows the program. The lower floors are linked into broad floorplates, giving tech tenants a campus-scale plate. Higher up, the Central Tower turns south and the East Tower turns north, so the most valuable office floors get the long views instead of facing each other.

Bridges That Bind the Office Towers

The ribbon works structurally in the urban sense, if not the engineering one: it ties the two office towers into a single organization. An elevated volume spans the street, and glazed bridges and angled white decks thread between the facades overhead. Looking up through the gap between towers, you read a layered sequence of connections rather than two separate buildings.

The risk with sky bridges is that they become token links, used once for a photo and then ignored. Here they carry planting and open terrace space, which gives people a reason to cross them on foot rather than through an internal corridor.

A Ground Plane Built for Passing Through

At street level, the base houses retail and generous plazas, with entrances on both the north and south sides so the site can be crossed rather than circled. Rock-edged planters, wavy paving and a ribbed soffit soften the tower entrance. A slatted timber underside shades the garden path between towers. A covered walkway of stone-clad columns and slanted glass fins frames views toward the hills.

A central atrium leads to the office lobbies and serves as what the architects call the base camp, the point where the ribbon begins its climb. The dormitory gets its own small lobby on the southern road, a sensible separation that keeps residential life out of the commuter flow.

The Ribbon as Outdoor Corridor

The most convincing images show the ribbon doing ordinary work. A long white walkway projects from a finned tower with stepped planters along one edge. A terrace edge with a glass balustrade sits beneath a tower overhang. A cantilevered roof garden holds a small group of people behind a curved parapet. These are corridors you can actually use, and they read as walking routes first and gardens second.

Shenzhen's subtropical climate makes this plausible for much of the year, and the overhangs and shaded seating show the design recognizes that heat and rain will decide how much the ribbon gets used. The real test comes in August, which no photograph can show.

Climbing the Building on Foot

Stairs are where the wellness agenda becomes physical. Granite steps run between planter beds of ferns and trees, and a rooftop path climbs past boulders and a perforated metal wall. The treads are wide enough to stop on, and several shots catch people pausing mid-flight to sit or talk. That is the difference between a stair you take because the elevator is slow and one you take because it is pleasant.

The hazy green hills behind these stairs are not incidental. Each flight seems to be oriented to give the climber a view as a reward, which turns vertical movement into something closer to a hillside walk.

Courts and Sky Terraces

A green-painted basketball court sits on a terraced sky deck between towers, framed by planter beds and curved benches. It is the boldest single move in the program and a clear signal of the client's audience: young engineers who would otherwise go to a gym across town. Elsewhere, smaller sky terraces with stone-edged planters and timber benches offer quieter places to sit.

Interspersing these terraces with office floors breaks up the vertical monotony of the typical tech tower. Common areas stop being a single amenity floor and become a sequence spread through the height of the building.

At the Crown

The ribbon ends on a roof garden of oval stepping stones laid across a grass grid, with the mountains as the backdrop. Inside, an elevator lobby corridor opens directly onto a balcony, a small but telling detail: even the most utilitarian circulation space here ends in daylight and a view.

Furniture as Landscape

The seating is built into the landscape rather than placed on it. A curved brick-edged bench rings a planted courtyard, and a timber bench is set into a granite planter wall among monstera leaves. This integration keeps the terraces from looking like furnished balconies and makes the planting and the seating read as one surface, which reinforces the idea of a continuous ground.

Plans and Drawings

The eight-step diagram is the clearest account of the scheme: a single tall block is split into three towers, then stitched back together with landscaped decks that join into one exterior ribbon. The exploded axonometric, with its circulation arrows, figures and drones, shows the ribbon as a building element in its own right, laid out as a sequence of planted decks.

The mid-level plan shows two office blocks with their own service cores around a central void, the arrangement that allows the linked lower floorplates. The east-west section shows the vertical logic: planted atriums stacked over basement parking, with stepped tree-lined terraces climbing the profile.

Why This Project Matters

Vertical greenery has become a cliché of Asian tower design, often amounting to planters bolted onto balconies that nobody can reach. LXD is more rigorous because it ties the landscape to movement. The ribbon is a route between floors, towers and programs, so the planting gets used by people who are trying to get somewhere. That distinction, landscape as infrastructure rather than decoration, is the project's real contribution, and its Gold at the 2022 MIPIM Asia Awards suggests the industry noticed.

Questions remain about maintenance, summer comfort and whether occupants will choose the long way round on a deadline. Still, for a district built largely of sealed glass boxes, LXD sets a useful precedent: a corporate tower can give back a version of the street it displaces and carry it up to the top floor.

TP-LINK LXD Building by KPF, Shenzhen, China. Area: 124,600 m². Completed: 2026. Photography: StudioSZ Photo, Justin Szeremeta.

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