Shenzhen is a city at warp speed. When Architect Ole Scheeren first visited in 1992, barely a decade after the swath of countryside north of Hong Kong was designated a Special Economic Zone, he recalls there was “not so much Shenzhen there yet.” Three decades later, it’s now a metropolis of nearly 15 million people and one of the most fertile grounds for architectural experimentation in Asia. Scheeren has been deeply enmeshed in its transformation. “We have more than 10 projects there,” he says. “It’s kind of crazy.” 

 

Scheeren’s latest commission, the Houhai Hybrid Campus in the city’s fast-developing western district, is conceived as a “totally integrated urban ecosystem” where living, working, leisure and nature fold together. Slated for completion next year, the campus breaks apart Shenzhen’s typical megablock, creating four interlinked quarters threaded with circulation loops and bridges that draw people inward to shaded gardens while also pushing outward toward the city. The goal, says Scheeren, was to “take the old concept of mixed-use in a way to a newly integrated level and a degree of intensity that I think still hasn't happened so often.” 

 

 

A few kilometres away, the Tencent Helix pushes that idea to another scale: half a million square metres of workspace spiraling around a vast elevated garden. Designed as the new global headquarters for China’s largest tech company, it is also meant to be a showcase of “sponge city” design that helps cope with increasingly extreme weather and rainfall that grows heavier and more unpredictable each year.  

 

The architecture itself is part of the hydrological system, with landscaped terraces that direct rainfall into a newly created lake that absorbs stormwater. The project is twice the size of Apple’s renowned Cupertino campus designed by Foster and Partners, but instead of a hermetic ring, its twisting towers open into a vortex meant to encourage encounter. “It has an urban dimension through the scale of it,” Scheeren explains. “But it’s entirely threaded through nature.” The park isn’t separate – it’s lifted into the building. 

 

For Scheeren, Shenzhen offers what older cities often lack: the willingness to rethink rules. Shenzhen is “super young” and “highly progressive,” he says. From the beginning of his days working in the city, he recalls, the Local Government was remarkably open to new ideas. “The city planners were really asking the questions, ‘How can we now rescript our rules? We allowed for this rapid growth, but how can we now instill an urban quality for the people that live here?’ It has simply been a ground for progressing rather quickly compared to other more grown and established environments.” 

 

 

Global ambitions  

 

Scheeren’s path to Shenzhen has been anything but linear. Born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1971, he studied architecture in Lausanne and London before landing at the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), where he became a partner under Rem Koolhaas. His most visible achievement from that period was the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing – a gravity-defying loop of steel and glass that looms over the city’s central business district like a colossal alien object. Completed in 2008, it remains one of the most recognisable skyscrapers in Asia, emblematic of China’s new era of global ambition. 

 

In 2010, Scheeren struck out on his own, founding Büro Ole Scheeren. If OMA’s work was often about provocation, his own practice has sought to temper spectacle with inhabitation. The Interlace in Singapore, completed in 2013, stacked 31 apartment blocks in a sprawling hexagonal arrangement, creating what he has described as a “vertical village.” Bangkok’s Mahanakhon tower, with its pixelated façade carved into terraces, became the city’s tallest building and a new symbol of its skyline when it opened in 2016. In Beijing, the Guardian Art Center, completed in 2018, fuses a cultural institution with a hotel and auction house, placing a perforated cube beside the Forbidden City. 

 

These projects have earned both acclaim and criticism. Admirers praise their boldness and clarity, the way they challenge typologies and propose new forms of urban life. But critics question whether their monumentality risks overshadowing the very communities they seek to nurture. Scheeren himself seems alert to this tension. “Architect is far more than its built form, shape, material, and all the tools we use as architects,” he says. “[It is] the focus of a human experience.” 

 

 

Form follows fiction 

 

That emphasis on lived experience has become the leitmotif of Scheeren’s work. When he launched his own office, he proposed that “form should not only follow function, but that form should also follow fiction.” Fiction, for him, means the imagined stories of people inhabiting a space – the ways architecture can script daily life. 

 

Nature is central to that script. At The Interlace, greenery seeps through courtyards and roof terraces, encouraging residents to gather in communal spaces while still maintaining private enclaves. Scheeren considers it a prototype, proof that architecture can foster community without sacrificing individuality. A decade later, the development remains fully occupied, something not always guaranteed in Singapore’s speculative real estate market. “Probably the most rewarding thing,” he says, “is to see how the people that live there have in many ways taken ownership of it, have really made it their own, have programmed it with their own stories.” 

 

Subsequent projects have elaborated on this theme. The Urban Glen, currently nearing completion in Hangzhou, layers vertical terraces of offices and hotels, with gardens woven through the massing. It’s an example of how Scheeren insists on avoiding what he calls the “visual alibi” of decorative greenery. “The solution is not in greening concrete walls,” he says, but to “integrate nature in a way in which it augments the quality of life and complements the quality of life in the urban conditions that we create.”  

 

 

Preparing for the future 

 

Climate change has given this philosophy new urgency. China has been a testing ground for the “sponge city” concept – landscapes designed to absorb and release stormwater – and Scheeren has embraced it. “We have to design for an increasingly uncertain and volatile future,” he says. Architecture must be “a concept of resilience.” 

 

Resilience, for Scheeren, is not only environmental but also social. Buildings should endure not just extreme weather but shifting ways of living and working. “Sustainability is not a short-term answer,” he says. “It is not, ‘Did I create a building that tomorrow consumes 20 percent less air conditioning?” It's also a question, ‘Will this building work over 100 years? Will it be derelict after 15 and have to be demolished because it simply doesn't function anymore?’” 

 

That long view requires flexibility: spaces that can be reprogrammed as needs evolve. Ceiling heights that allow for different uses, layouts that blur boundaries between functions. In this sense, Scheeren’s experiments in Shenzhen — hybrids of office, housing, hotel and park — are not just exercises in density but attempts to pre-empt futures we cannot fully predict.

 

 

 

Hong Kong: the missing project 

 

If Shenzhen has become Scheeren’s laboratory, Hong Kong remains his unbuilt muse. He has lived in the city, taught at the University of Hong Kong and has maintained an office here for years, yet not a single building bears his name. 

 

“Sometimes you have to wait for the right moment,” he says, noting that he spent a decade nurturing ties in Bangkok before Mahanakhon took shape. But Hong Kong’s influence runs deep. When he first visited in 1992, it was the sheer compression that struck him — not only the verticality but the “four-dimensional” layering of streets, footbridges and escalators, pressed between mountains and sea, constantly changing from one hour to the next. “It was really another level of futurism,” he recalls. That proximity of dense city and wild nature suggested to him that architecture could do more than separate the two; it could weave them together. 

 

The irony is clear: Hong Kong inspired his thinking but Shenzhen has provided the ground to test it. Where Hong Kong has grown more risk-averse, Shenzhen has embraced experimentation, with a planning culture open to revising its rules. Scheeren still hopes that he will one day work on a project here. “I’m sure the Hong Kong moment will come,” he says. 

 

 

What to expect at BODW 

 

In December, Scheeren will return to Hong Kong to speak at Business of Design Week, the city’s flagship design forum. It won’t be his first time: he delivered a keynote at one of BODW’s first editions nearly 20 years ago. This time, he plans to reflect on what has changed since then – not only in his own career, but in architecture’s place in a world of accelerating uncertainty. 

 

Scheeren’s trajectory captures a broader shift in architecture: from iconic objects toward flexible ecosystems, from form-making to scripting lived stories, from short-term spectacle to long-term resilience. Yet his projects are unmistakable – bold, ambitious, never timid.  

 

It remains to be seen how they will truly adapt to the messier, less scripted forms of life that give cities their resilience. But that is their ambition, at the very least. Whether in Shenzhen’s experimental campuses or Singapore’s lived-in courtyards, Scheeren’s buildings invite people to take ownership, to inscribe their own fictions. Architecture is never finished when the construction cranes depart. It begins only when life flows in, when nature reclaims its place, when a city learns to bend toward an uncertain future. 

 

Writer: Christopher DeWolf    

 

This column is produced in partnership with Zolima CityMag, an online magazine that explores Hong Kong’s arts, design, history and culture.