Steven Holl won the commission through an architectural competition, and he later described his victory in clear terms: the key was maximizing public landscape while working within the area's 35-meter height limit and making full use of sea views from occupied spaces. The constraint became the concept. A conventional tower on this site would have consumed ground plane and blocked breezes. By lifting the entire program — offices for Vanke Co., a hotel, apartments, a conference center, auditorium, and restaurant — onto eight cores positioned as far as 50 meters apart, Holl inverted the usual trade-off. The 35-meter height limit, a restriction meant to protect the coastal skyline, became the datum from which the building hangs rather than rises. Below it, sea breezes move freely through the garden. Above it, every room faces the South China Sea.

The engineering that makes the Horizontal Skyscraper possible draws on cable-stay bridge technology — the kind of structural logic usually applied to suspending roadways across rivers, here adapted to suspend a building across a tropical garden. Combined with a high-strength concrete frame, this hybrid system allows the building to span enormous distances between its eight cores without the forest of columns that would otherwise be required at ground level. The façade adds another layer of sophistication: each of the building's 26 faces was calculated individually based on solar heat gain, with louvers tuned to the sun's orientation. Some louvers are fixed, some have variable apertures, and some are sensor-controlled, opening and closing in response to real-time conditions. The full-height glass curtain wall and high-performance low-emissivity coatings bring daylight deep into interior spaces while limiting solar heat gain — a critical consideration in Shenzhen's subtropical climate.

The site covers approximately 60,000 square meters, of which roughly 45,000 square meters is planted. Add the building's green roof — around 15,000 square meters — and the total planted area approaches what the site contained before any development occurred: a form of ecological restoration built into the project's accounting. The landscape is not decorative. It functions as infrastructure. The site sits on reclaimed, stabilized land, and the lagoon at its edge operates as a bio-swale and retention pond, connected to nearby waterways. Sunken gardens, courtyards, ponds, and planted mounds form a circulatory system that regulates stormwater across the site. Permeable pavements — river stones, crushed gravel, grasscrete — allow rainfall to infiltrate before overflow routes it through ponds planted with marsh grasses and lotus. No potable water is used for irrigation. The landscape manages itself.

Sustainability at the Vanke Center is thorough enough to have earned LEED Platinum certification — the highest rating in the US Green Building Council's system. The building's energy strategy layers passive and active approaches. From November through March, when Shenzhen's climate is mild, natural window ventilation can replace mechanical systems in most of the building entirely; during this season, mechanical ventilation can be switched off for roughly 60% of the time, reducing annual electricity consumption by an estimated 5 kilowatt-hours per square meter. Heat recovery units exchange temperatures between exhausted and incoming air, preventing cooling energy from escaping. Photovoltaic panels covering 1,400 square meters of roof generate 12.5% of the headquarters' total electrical demand. The result earned the building an AIA NY Architecture Honor Award, a Green Good Design Award, and recognition as Best Green Project in the Good Design is Good Business Awards.

The Horizontal Skyscraper is, in some ways, a portrait of what Shenzhen has been willing to attempt. A city that invented itself in roughly four decades has no strong attachment to conventional typologies — it built everything new, and it has been willing to build strangely. Holl's commission from Vanke, one of China's largest real estate developers, asked him to imagine headquarters that could represent the company's ambitions while remaining genuinely public at ground level. The result is a building that anyone can walk through — a covered path runs its full length, connecting hotel to apartments to offices, and the garden below is freely accessible. That openness, in a city where private developments often wall themselves from the street, is itself a statement. The skyscraper lies down, and the city gets a garden.