Envision Energy

Envision Energy is a leading Chinese wind turbine manufacturer backed by a European clean energy fund. Envision's core business comprises development, manufacturing, sales and maintenance of advanced technology wind turbine generators (WTG). The company commissioned AECOM to design a new 3,000-square meter, 3-story headquarters building in Suzhou, China. The design of the new headquarters draws upon the idea of an airfoil and wind movement to visually connect the building to Envision's product. The new design is for a temporary headquarters while a larger building is developed.

The Envision Energy Headquarters is a multi-purpose office building located directly adjacent to an assembly facility responsible for assembly of the rotor component of the wind turbine system. The Headquarters will support design engineers and the Executive Directors of Envision while providing public display and educational facilities informing Envision's customers of the benefits of renewable energy. The building also houses dining facilities, a sports and fitness center and an employee "Spirit Lounge Room" designed to promote collaboration and rejuvenation among the design talent responsible for developing the future in wind technology.

Designed for purpose
The concept of the winds, energy and movement was the inspiration for the building's massing, exterior skin and interior atrium. The wind's movements have an adverse reaction to the massing, shearing a single glass volume into two volumes that have slipped against each other along a north/south axis. This shearing movement creates a cantilever that shelters the main entrance on the north side of the building while producing a roof terrace on the south side of the building. Site constraints required that the building maintain a north/south orientation, and in order to connect the building to the site, visitor parking was located directly north of the building's cantilever for direct movement into the building's entrance.

The building's metallic exterior skin further reinforces wind movement, flowing around a perpendicularly inserted volume into the main body of the building that is the central monitoring mission control room for Envision's wind turbines around the world. This polished, aluminum airfoil-shaped volume, or the "Envision Eye," located on level 2, creates a synergy between the building's main glass volumetric characteristics and the airfoil, which allows an external perforated shading device to flow around the airfoil, reminiscent of fluid dynamic studies moving about a physical solid. This airfoil is also the physical link between the New Headquarters and the factory building, which allows visitors and employees alike free movement between the two structures.

The energy of the wind's fluid-like movement flows below the cantilever of the main entrance and into the interior of the building, carving an atrium through the three levels of the interior space that visually connects the inner program of the headquarters building into a unified whole. The atrium, organic in form, moves around the "Envision Eye" and emerges at the roof of the building, allowing natural light to filter down into the space and to the main lobby below. The organic nature of the atrium, with its curving sloped floor, provides a space for exhibit of Envision's products and is the beginning point for a tour circuit to allow Envision's clients a look into their products, operations, monitoring and ultimately construction of wind energy turbines.

Cory Ticktin