Designboom_ The Ascentage Pharmaceutical Headquarters is a new and modern 147,000 sqm R&D and manufacturing complex that took shape in Suzhou, China. Completed by OLI architecture for a young Hong Kong-listed pharmaceutical company, the project symbolizes the aspirations of Ascentage’s culture, whose cutting-edge research in Biotechnology has developed promising new cancer drugs for a future generation afflicted with diseases once thought untreatable or incurable. The state-of-the-art campus was realized using some of the most technologically advanced digital design and fabrication tools — including parametric technology.

Open, clean, and modern, the Ascentage Pharma Headquarters by OLI Architecture emerges as a new campus of seven buildings boasting discrete curvilinear shapes. Soft in nature, the public and employee programmed volumes are elevated above a glass base in a floating composition over a black granite-clad reflecting pool facing the main Xinqing Road. The 80-meter-tall R&D and Administration Building, the new symbol of Ascentage, sits at the intersection of the busy southwest corner of the 60,870 sqm site in the Suzhou Industrial Park, close to a new mass transit subway station.

Inspired by the benzene ring of the chemical formula used to annotate the planar bonds of the six carbon and hydrogen molecules, each building facade is carefully designed using the benzene ring hexagon as the source form, which is then engineered to fold parametrically around the seven different volumes. These parametrically modeled facades using adaptive BIM families were then digitally fabricated using Ultra High Strength Concrete panels and anodized aluminum nodes and extrusions, affording distinct facade designs for the optimal balance of visual transparency and privacy. Together with new high-tech research labs and an expansive advanced manufacturing fit-out bathed with diffuse natural light filtering from its translucent roof, the distinctly programmed composition of the projects’ buildings creates a singular campus for Ascentage.