Location: Nanjing, China.

Architect: KRIS YAO | ARTECH.

TSMC’s Nanjing Campus is a new development of high-tech companies in China that aims to be a sustainable, high-tech, and humanistic environment combining R&D and production. The campus is designed to be a FAB in the forest, with lush vegetation surrounding futuristic and humanistic spaces for working. The architectural imagery is a serial transformation of circular forms, symbolizing TSMC’s leading role in high-level wafer production. The buildings are streamlined in futuristic forms and enveloped in silvery metal-panels, seeming to float above or within the forest. The 180m-diametered lake serves for scenic and leisure purposes, mitigates the local hydrology and sub-climate, and enhances biodiversity. The buildings touch the earth lightly and are assimilated into the landscape, representing the merge of future and nature. The FAB plant and its subsidiaries are unified as one single volume, together with the Campus Gate and the lake, like interconnected ripples. The R&D Office Tube combines the staff working space and product logistic path, and a green sky-walk will link the offices of Phase I and II developments. The overall architectural intentions aim at the possibility of communication among staff and the diversity of daylighting and views of the foliage. The design provides a lavishly green living environment by bringing the outside in, while fostering a highly efficient working ambiance through the horizontal planning of working zones. Combining sustainability, technology, and humanities, this is to be a 21 century campus of manufacturing and working.

Photo credit: Kris Provoost.