Shenzhen Airport East Integrated Transportation Hub (CN)

The Wings of Shenzhen’s highly-experienced and internationally-renowned consortium team consists of UN Studio and Atkins for architectural design, passenger transport interchange, airport and urban planning. BMEDI and BIAD both have exceptional technical capability and local knowledge in delivering mega infrastructure projects in China.

Ben van Berkel: “The Wings of Shenzhen is a flash forward into the future, connecting sustainable forms of mobility and people, and creating an infrastructure for the city and its people to thrive. We envision the integrated hub as a vibrant part of the City of Shenzhen, providing focus and regeneration of the district and seamless connectivity to national and international destinations. By linking the physical and the digital we create a sense of place and facilitate the intuitive and efficient flow of passengers.”

This is a unique project in which a large high-speed railway station is fully integrated with an international airport. The building has been designed with operational efficiency and future flexibility in mind, with the ability to flexibly accommodate changes in traffic profile by clever arrangement and use of space. One of the most spectacular technical features of the Hub is its roof, designed as an envelope that fits the organization with the entry points at the center. It is a lightweight, modular structure with scalar transparency, integrated solar shading and building integrated PV cells.

The primary vertical circulation between the two main levels expresses itself as the Central Plaza, where we bring the city right into the core of the Hub, with priority given to passenger experience. This is the main hall for departure and arrival, crosslinking all the different modes of transport – plane, train, metro, APM, bus, car, bike and autonomous vehicles. At the same time, the Central Plaza is like a marketplace: where people meet, shop, relax, eat, drink and explore the spirit of Shenzhen. This programming, and the extension of the hub into the development designed on the plots to the north and south of the Hub, also makes it a destination within the Greater Bay Area.

As part of our human-centric approach, we have made light and green into key natural guides. Vegetation leads passengers up to the gates and daylight guides passengers up from the platform level, to the common ground and outwards to the north, the south, and to the east. Because our design opens the front of the building to the city, we are able to create fluent connections between the internal and external spaces, with the landscape brought inside, introducing green zones as elements for wayfinding and linking Shenzhen seamlessly with its new front door.

Ben van Berkel: “The Wings will be more than simply a place to transfer. It is a highly-recognizable public space destination that invites, connects and guides people from the multiple hub modalities into the city, and vice versa: a new urban gateway.”