China Corporate United Pavilion, Dubai迪拜中国企业联合馆

The China Corporate United Pavilion (CCUP) in Dubai is a 12,000 m² venue offering a range of services to Chinese companies abroad, and a platform for cultural exchange between China and the Islamic world. Contacts between the two cultures go back to trade between East Asia and Arabia in the 5th century, and the Silk Road long bound them together; the pavilion sets out to carry that shared history toward new commercial, cultural and social ties.

The design grows from what the two cultures share and where they differ. Taking the horizontal Chinese ink landscape as its mood, it imagines a mirage-like world in which Chinese garden and Arabian tent, desert and sea, moon and water coexist. The nine-square grid—from calligraphy to the Chinese house, palace and city—orders the plan. The vertical landscape scroll, with its layering and overlapping depths, is reinterpreted as a pixelated double-skin façade: six stainless-steel shutter modules of differing openness, distributed by computation, compose layered mountains in light and act as sun-shading.

Above, a twisted membrane structure translates the dunes of the desert and the line of the sea horizon, creating varied spaces for the programme, and recalls the accumulated geometry of the muqarnas dome in contemporary construction. The typology of the Arabian tent becomes a sustainable Chinese garden on the roof, an exclusive gathering space where the distant Dubai skyline and a classical garden form a single landscape. The design received a German Design Award in 2019.