The SCGZero+ project is designed to be the first “5Zero” office building – Zero carbon, Zero energy, Zero water, Zero waste, and Zero formaldehyde that houses 400+ staff in Shanghai, China. The project seeks to build on dB(A)’s experience in designing <a href="https://db-a.co/projects/pixel-building/">Pixel</a>, to achieve a new global benchmark and highest scores in LEED, BREEAM, WELL, China3Star and China Healthy Building. The goal is to achieve the world’s most exemplary status in sustainability in order to help China and the world in our race to reach net zero as soon as possible. Invested and constructed by SCG, dB(A) and SCG LDI have gathered a team of the world’s best experts in international and local sustainable design to realise the project. Working from our globally distributed virtual offices throughout 2019 and 2020, the team has minimised CO2 in design, and sought to ensure the very best innovation and insight is applied in design thinking.

Location

Status

Client

Architect + Landscape Design

Interior Design + Workplace Planning

Local Design Institute

ESD + MEP Consultant

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(Site)
Located in Taopu Zhichuang City, Putuo District, Shanghai, the project site area is 3422 sqm, with a total construction area of 11509 sqm – 4548 sqm below ground and 6313 sqm above ground. The proposal applies green concepts and technologies throughout the entire life cycle of the building’s design, construction, operation, and maintenance. It implements the highest domestic green standards to minimise energy consumption and environmental pollution, whilst maximising comfort and enjoyment of its purpose.
(5Zero Office Building)
The vision for the SCGZero+ project is driven by ‘Life’. ‘Life’ is a complex, ordered, and symbiotic relationship between the infinite threads of our world, woven into a harmonious tapestry. A project that achieves the world’s most exemplary status in sustainability must be a project that lives, and weaves harmony into its ideation, operations and built form. It is a project that communicates and celebrates the cycles of the natural world and educates culturally about the connectedness of our bodies and business to the complex, subtle and powerful rhythms of nature. Our architecture is driven by this notion of being connected and interdependent, of linkage and exchange of energy, of ideas and of vision.
(Construction)
The project adopts prefabricated construction methodologies, application of modular high-performance green building systems, aimed to minimise the workload on site. This in turn, reduces the noise, exhaust, and wastewater discharge caused by on-site operations. 
In addition, the solid waste generated in the different stages of construction will be minimised, and where waste is created, it will be classified according to its source, composition, physical and chemical properties, etc. for upcycling, reuse, recycling, and reclamation where possible. The management of the whole process will be translated into educational and demonstrational technical case studies for improving the systematic procedures in green construction for the future.
(Facade)
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The façade is our key interface with the world, it is the key to operation and Passivhaus creation. It is airtight, triple glazed, prefabricated and extremely sophisticated. We have grown the understanding deployed in Pixel to improve the living edge, to maximise PV generation and improve daylighting. The façade of the project is its skin, and like our own skin, it is a complex interface, enabling natural ventilation, water harvesting, thermally broken structures and impressive connection to exterior views and daylight.
• Passive House 
• PV Façade 
• Natural Ventilation 
• Shading 
• Triple Glazing
(Daylight)
The skylights in the building – including the main atrium – introduce more natural light into the space, paying homage to the concept of healthy workplace architecture. Interior lighting will utilise daylight sensors and circadian lighting systems to continuously adjust the colour temperature of the light in time and context. This solves the problem of fatigue caused by traditional lighting environments, and in turn reduces energy consumption when compared with traditional lighting.
(Purpose)
The purpose of the SCGZero+ is aligned with Pixel’s role in the last Decade – to demonstrate and deliver on innovative, transferrable technologies that can lead the path to changing and improving the rules upon which sustainable buildings are built. Key to this is the understanding of an integrated network of ecological thinking- not just the reduction of energy and cost, but the integration of systems and symbiosis that nature has perfected over billions of years.
The built form grows like a landscape – a multi-terraced organism that welcomes light, people and ideas. Our architecture inspires exploration, that human drive to discover and reveal new thoughts. It expresses the hope of growth, a striving for life and light that drives all the scales of life, from the smallest corals to the largest reefs. It celebrates the eternal realities and wisdom of recycled energy and material, with a Zero+ philosophy making the building a producer of energy, of clean water and of brilliant new ideas. The project invites the most innovative and entrepreneurial of minds to reconsider business as usual, and to set the benchmark for a connected human culture to prosper alongside a thriving nature, and not in exchange for that.
(Legacy)
Zero+ represents a new way of building, of embedding technology and symbiosis in everyday thinking, and of celebrating Life in this new and challenging century.
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