Shenzhen Huahui Design and iDEA Stack a Library and Youth Center Around a Hanging Garden in Luohu

Luohu is one of Shenzhen's oldest urban districts. Its streets are tight, its housing blocks press close together, and the hills and reservoirs that frame it sit almost within arm's reach of the city. That is the condition Shenzhen Huahui Design and iDEA were working with on the Luohu Library and Youth Activity Center. The project was completed in 2025 and totals 77,077 m². It puts a district library and a youth activity center on a single site surrounded by dense residential neighbourhoods. The design team was led by chief architect Xiao Cheng at Huahui, with iDEA's principals Gao Yan and Guo Xin.

The interesting move is not the program mix itself. Plenty of Chinese civic buildings bundle culture and education. What stands out is how the architects took the district's own description of itself, half landscape and half city, and turned it into a vertical organizing logic. The building does not spread across its plot. It rises as two offset volumes, one for reading and one for youth activity, and the two are stitched together by a hanging garden several levels up. On a site where open ground is scarce, building upward is how the project gives ground back.

Reading Luohu from Above

The aerial views explain the brief better than any diagram. Low rooftops spread in every direction, and a forested hill sits directly behind. The towers rise out of this fabric as a clear vertical marker, but they never feel like a slab dropped onto the neighbourhood. The stepping and offsetting break the mass into pieces closer in scale to the surrounding blocks.

We think this matters because Luohu's grain is fine, and a 77,000 m² civic building could easily have flattened it. Instead, the green terraces visible from above read as a continuation of the hill behind. It is a small gesture at district scale, but it shows the architects were looking past their site boundary.

Two Towers, One Bridge

From street level, the defining image is two glass towers joined by a curved bridge. At dusk, with traffic streaking below, it reads almost as a gateway. Under overcast skies, framed by street trees, it is quieter and more civic. The bridge is the visible sign of the plan's central idea: the library and youth center are independent vertically and connected horizontally.

That separation is practical. A teenager heading to a dance class and a retiree heading to the reading room should not have to share a lobby queue. Stacking similar functions within each tower keeps circulation legible. The horizontal links let the two programs borrow from each other when it helps, and the shared garden is where they meet.

Offset Stacking as Form

The volumes do not stack neatly. Each block shifts off-axis from the one below, and the result is a silhouette that changes depending on where you stand. Against the hills at dusk, the glazed and finned surfaces pick up the sky differently, so the towers read as a family of related pieces rather than one monolith.

This kind of shifting can easily become arbitrary. Here it earns its place. Each offset produces a terrace, an overhang, or a sheltered void below, and the building uses all of these as public space.

The Fin Facade

Vertical fins wrap much of the building and give it its texture. Seen from below through tree branches, they turn the curved canopy into a sweeping, ribbed surface that catches late afternoon light. At the base, framed by a mature tree, they rise above a fully glazed ground floor, so the mass reads as lifted and the street edge stays open.

The fins do more than decorate. In Shenzhen's subtropical sun, a vertical screen is a sensible way to temper direct light on glazing. The facade drawings show that the fin angles vary. The specification may be one module, but the elevation shifts subtly as you move around it.

Freeing the Ground Plane

The underside of the cantilevered volumes is where the vertical strategy pays off for the public. A paved plaza runs beneath the curving soffits, and glazed entrances face it directly. The library entrance sits below a projecting finned volume and a large media screen. It is an unapologetically urban gesture, closer to a transit concourse than a hushed reading room.

That is intentional. The design follows a transit-oriented approach that ties bus connections and walking and cycling routes into the ground level. The plaza is meant to be crossed, not just arrived at, and the building's base is designed for people moving through the city.

Gardens in the Air

The multi-level hanging garden is the project's real public room. A winding path threads between the lifted volumes, and lawns and planted beds sit beneath the curved undersides of the towers. Open terraces carry white stairs and timber benches. In the photographs, the people using it are mostly young: boys walking past, students standing around in daylight. That suggests the garden is working as an extension of the youth program rather than a decorative roof.

Neighbourhoods this dense rarely have outdoor space that is both safe and unsupervised in the good sense. A garden several floors up, reachable from both a library and an activity center, is a credible answer to that gap. It is also the clearest expression of the stated aim of a dialogue between architecture and nature.

Interiors Built for Lingering

Inside, the interior teams, City Group and SD Design, lean on a restrained palette: white stone stairs, timber slat walls and soffits, and full-height glazing. The atrium stair has a timber-clad underside and recessed, light-framed niches in the walls. The space is calm but never static, and in the photographs students blur past in motion.

The stepped reading terrace is the most successful interior. Wide timber steps with built-in shelves and purple cushions run alongside a stair and escalator, so circulation and reading share the same section. It borrows the tribune-seating type that Chinese libraries have embraced over the past decade, and it suits a building aimed at young users who rarely sit at a conventional desk.

The Youth Program Up Close

The youth center side is frankly practical. A gymnastics hall with colored mats and bars sits under a black ceiling, and tall windows look straight out at apartment blocks. A training room has long timber desks facing a glazed wall with hazy city views. Neither space is precious, which is the point. The project is meant to extend school education into the community, and these rooms look ready for heavy daily use.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan places the building among housing blocks, sports tracks and a highway interchange, which explains the emphasis on ground-level connections. The basement holds an auditorium, a theatre and a sunken plaza. The sixth floor plan shows the two footprints joined by a large hatched garden terrace, the hinge of the whole scheme. The exploded axonometric is the clearest diagram of the program logic. It colours the library tower green and the youth center red, so you can see the two programs stacked side by side.

The early pencil sketch is worth noting. It shows rounded, off-axis volumes against distant hills, with a metro entrance at street level. The built project stays remarkably close to that first idea. The facade drawings and fin angle studies show how much care went into resolving the screen at the scale of a single panel.

Why This Project Matters

Shenzhen's older districts face a familiar problem: they need more civic space, and they have almost no land to put it on. The Luohu Library and Youth Activity Center offers a clear model. Stack the program and separate it by type. Link the parts horizontally, and use the voids created by the stacking as public ground, both at the street and in the air. Nothing here depends on a novel material or structural trick. It depends on organizing the section with discipline.

We would also point to the social intent. Pairing a library with a youth center, in a district rich in schools, treats public reading and after-school activity as one civic offer rather than two separate departments. Whether the hanging garden stays as lively as it looks in the photographs will depend on management as much as design. Still, the architecture has given the neighbourhood a vertical commons it did not have before.

Luohu Library and Youth Activity Center by Shenzhen Huahui Design and iDEA, with landscape design by AUBE and interior design by City Group and SD Design. Location: Luohu District, Shenzhen, China. Area: 77,077 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Right Angle Image and On-site Elephrame.

About the Studio

iDEA

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.