Szechuan, China

One California is a multipurpose gateway building at the entry to Meishan California Smart City, Szechuan, China

It is a perforated great wall, boldly announcing its presence to Tianfu Avenue, edging and framing the new smart city, presenting its heritage and aspirations.

The punctured wall is both boundary and gateway, the openings windows to the new city.

The building is emblematic of the smart city where landscape and structure are an integrated system, green building which cohabits nature, harmonious and open, entered from a series of bridges which cross the ponds it floats in.

The building is generous infrastructure for the commercial core that can change and adapt as the town evolves, not program specific sculptural form, but a framework, a scaffold of structure and space creating enclosure and connections that can evolve with time.

Floating in a wetland, the building reflects and condenses the natural history of the site where life and place are intimately integrated.

The building is at the scale of landscape, capturing nature in, on and around it. Traditional and innovative, conventional and futuristic, it presents an image of aspiration of a city bound with nature.