To accommodate their meteoric growth, Chinese tech giant Tencent began plans for its new headquarters in Qianhai Bay almost immediately after completion of their current Shenzhen headquarters, the Tencent Seafront Towers. But their ambition for their next home is on another level: the brief asked for a total of 2 million square metres of floor space to accommodate offices for 80,000–100,000 employees.
Beyond its scale, the brief is also technologically ambitious. Expanding on their mission statement, which foregrounds the “user value” of technology and the benefits it can bring to everyday life, they requested that their new campus be an exemplary smart city district, demonstrating the city-altering potential of the latest urban technologies.

“Our studies and competition entry for Tencent are an attempt to show that the smart city is also the green city”, says MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas. “With ubiquitous smart city elements, headlined by a futuristic data hub at the heart of the campus, Tencent employees would feel enveloped by technology. But they are also literally surrounded by nature, with the serpentine park always within a short walking distance, and green terraces all around them.”
In their design process for the Tencent Campus, MVRDV conducted a complex research project to arrive at the optimal design for a modern tech campus. The design team developed 28 different outline designs, ordering them into a design “genealogy” that traced multiple evolutionary branches as the team sought to add key qualities to their previous designs. “All studies were scripted, thus preparing a new way of designing and maintaining future smart cities”, added Winy Maas. “The final competition entry was a synthesis of everything learned in this iterative process, resulting in a tech campus that is diverse, flexible, green, dynamic, open, adaptable, and above all, visionary.”