Along a reclaimed coastline in Shenzhen, MAD’s Tengyun Center rises above the shore as three cloud-like office volumes held 8.6 meters (30 feet) in the air. Designed for Tencent’s headquarters campus in China, the building complex opens the ground below as public coastal space where visitors can move beneath the workplace toward the water.

The gesture gives the project its point, as corporate campuses often build their own internal worlds, with landscape and amenities kept behind a controlled edge. Here, MAD lifts the main mass onto ten structural cores, freeing the land below as a shaded field of paths, lawns, planted slopes, and views of the sea.

image © Zhang Chao

With its Tengyun Center in Shenzhen, the architects at MAD bring together three interconnected volumes along a north-south axis, each one hovering above the public plane and linked by elevated steel-truss bridges. The raised structure releases the equivalent of two full floors of space beneath the buildings, turning the site into a shaded field of paths, lawns, planted slopes, and open areas with views toward the sea.

The southern volume holds exhibition and event spaces, including a second-floor public room oriented toward the bay. The central and northern volumes contain offices arranged around open atriums, with circulation and shared areas placed to maintain visual contact with the coastline. In the northern building, a semi-open shell-shaped ETFE skylight brings daylight into the interior while filtering the strong coastal sun.

image © AOGVision

The same idea continues through facade system of Shenzhen’s Tengyun Center. Large curved glass surfaces and frameless glazing reduce interruption across the sea-facing elevations, while integrated horizontal shading follows the rounded geometry of the buildings to soften solar exposure. The technical elements are folded into the overall spatial approach, serving the project’s larger effort to keep workplace, public passage, and climate in conversation.

At ground level, the campus avoids the familiar corporate edge of walls, gates, and planted buffers. The landscape moves through the lifted structures and toward the coast, where existing mangroves, tidal habitats, and bird migration routes are preserved as part of a government-led restoration effort. The shoreline keeps its ecological role while the building occupies the land above with a lighter urban gesture.

image © AOGVision

image © Zhang Chao

image © Zhu Yumeng