Not a tower, but a pyramid: OMA creates a symbol for Hangzhou, China’s new tech capital

Under the direction of partner Chris van Duijn and project architect Michael Hadjistyllis, OMA has completed a project that once again uses architectural form to stake a claim in the ongoing transformation of Chinese cities. And once again, the city in question carries considerable cultural and strategic weight: Hangzhou.

Future Tech City is an innovation hub within a city that, in the span of a generation, has grown from a destination celebrated for its landscape into a major node of the country’s technology economy. Hangzhou is home to Alibaba and NetEase, and has positioned itself in direct competition with Beijing and Shanghai for the attention of a mobile, highly qualified workforce. It is within this still-evolving context that OMA’s first completed project in the city has been built.

Commissioned by Xinhu Real Estate Group, Prism consolidates 43,000 square metres of mixed programme – hotel, residential lofts, offices and urban amenities – into a single pyramidal volume. The final form, the most interesting part of the project, is the result of two oblique cuts through the building mass, which generate a recognisable silhouette while establishing visual axes toward the high-speed rail station to the northwest and a park to the southeast.

The incisions also produce a series of elevated lofts, each with a private terrace and open views across the city and the surrounding landscape. Rising to a defined apex, the building holds its own against the scale of the district without resorting to the sheer verticality typical of the typology.

Chris van Duijn

The relationship between the building and its urban surroundings is most legible at ground level. A large exterior atrium opens to the public, connected directly to the adjacent park and canal system. The space functions as a civic threshold, neither fully interior nor fully urban, designed to accommodate the movement of residents, hotel guests, office workers and visitors without enforcing a strict hierarchy between them.

Communal areas are distributed throughout the section, extending this porosity across multiple levels rather than concentrating it at the base alone. Interior gardens and water features occupy the void at the heart of the system, giving the shared space a quality that distinguishes it from the generic public plazas common to developments of this kind. Prism is accompanied by an adjacent 35,000-square-metre residential tower whose façade geometry echoes that of the main volume, reinforcing the legibility of the ensemble within the district. Since what is taking shape in this chapter of Hangzhou’s life is, in effect, a new Central Business District, the unconventional character of interventions like Prism could help define its identity.

Opening images: Hangzhou Prism, Oma, 2026, China. Courtesy Oma