DISSONA

LIVE-WORK

COMPLEX

The Dissona Live-Work Complex is an R&D center and factory es­tablished for a fashion brand led by an enlightened female entrepreneur with an ambitious humanitarian agenda. Located in the sprawling manufacturing district of Dongguan, in China’s Pearl River Delta, this alternative to sweatshop culture seeks to change the dead-end labor conditions in the region, which have led to suicides and discontent among its workers. Instead, Dissona emphasizes long-term career development and upward mobility, aiming to train blue-collar migrant laborers to fill white-collar management positions over the span of several years. The result is a paradigm-shifting workplace that merges manufacturing with generous recreational, cultural, and educational programs in a residential setting more akin to a college campus than a factory complex.

The urban-scale campus plays a central role in this progressive vision. The one-million-square-foot megabuilding is a horizontally and vertically integrated structure that expresses a distinctly antihierarchical ethos. Sinuous, strandlike program bars—containing housing, offices, research and development areas, educational and recreational facilities, and factory floors—weave across the landscape, crossing under and over one another to form a porous fabric of outdoor courts and internal nodes that interconnect the campus.

The nodes act as mixing chambers that bring all members of the Dissona community together, from executives to janitorial staff. To support educational programming, the building provides classrooms for a broad range of training courses, an internet café, and a library. Arts and leisure spaces include a full-service gym, a movie theater, an outdoor amphitheater large enough to hold the facility’s four thousand residents, and a rooftop running track. Lush courtyard gardens nestled between the strands host sports fields, urban farms, contemplative gardens, and outdoor gathering spaces.

In contrast to standard overcrowded factory dormitories, the Dissona residential units offer dignified private living quarters, including operable windows for each resident along with private study areas and semiprivate bathrooms. The factory spaces foster an uplifting atmosphere, filled with natural light, cross-ventilation, sixteen-foot ceilings, and access to outdoor space. While extreme temperatures and humidity typically limit the use of glass, a system of undulating louvers, or “eyelids,” provides shade and ventilation while reducing energy consumption. As a result, the factory levels were able to be entirely glazed. The eyelids scale up in manufacturing areas and scale down in domestic spaces, giving the architecture its unifying expression.

The living, working, cultural, and educational environments, combined with retail operations at the building’s base, create a dynamic city within a city.