Creative Offices for DreamWorks
International architecture firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates (KPF) has unveiled designs for DreamWorks Asia Headquarters, Oriental Dreamworks and creative offices in the new Shanghai DreamCenter. Located along the riverside in Xuhui District, the 463,000 sq m DreamCenter is an integrated cultural and lifestyle development that will feature performing arts spaces, creative media spaces, black box and Imax theaters, as well as entertainment, fashionable retail areas and premium restaurants and bars.
“Together with the West Bund Media Port, this will become the world’s third great urban centre for entertainment and arts alongside New York’s Broadway and London’s West End,” said DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg.
The scheme is the result of collaboration between Hong Kong Lan Kwai Fong Group, DreamWorks Animation and Shanghai China Media Capital and will be the flagship project of Shanghai’s West Bund Media Port, a large-scale development focused on creative and digital media, technology, and cultural industries.
Through the revitalization of the hundred-year-old former cement factory and other industrial artifacts into memorable live performance venues and F&B facilities, DreamCenter blends together the site’s industrial and cultural history with modern architecture, offering an unseen experience for the people of Shanghai and international tourists.
KPF’s two-block design represents the creative heart of the master plan and its largest district. The eastern block is home to a pair of creative office towers, a theatre building and arts building, whose open-air rooftop features a sculpture garden.
The western block features a pair of towers (DreamCenter’s tallest), which angle slightly as they rise above this space, framing the views westward towards the DreamCenter and Huangpu Riverfront and creating ‘sky canyons’ that mark the development in the sky by day and emanate light and activity by night.
At the base of the tower, the design includes a direct connection to the Shanghai Metro, a shared retail podium, and an elevated pedestrian walkway lined with shops and restaurants that extends eastward to connect the entire development. Construction of the Shanghai DreamCenter will begin this year and is expected to complete in 2017.
Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates