Former water bird habitat becomes the conceptual foundation for award-winning corporate headquarters design.
Water birds once spread their wings across lakeside terrain in Fuyang, China. That precise gesture of flight became the conceptual foundation for the Xinhe Group Headquarters, designed by Pengfei He and his team at Simo Architectural Engineering Design Co., Ltd. The project spans 22,800 square meters across six separate buildings, each positioned along the water to follow natural terrain contours. Pengfei He distributed the program across smaller volumes that settle into their surroundings with quiet confidence, allowing the landscape to remain the primary visual presence. The design earned a Golden A' Design Award in Architecture, Building and Structure Design in 2025, recognizing extraordinary integration of corporate function with environmental sensitivity. For enterprises considering significant architectural investments, the Xinhe headquarters offers a compelling demonstration that organizational ambition and ecological respect can strengthen each other.
The fragmented approach achieves distinctive outcomes. Each of the six buildings maintains its own relationship to lake, hills, and sky, ensuring employees throughout the complex access natural light and picturesque views. The intervals between structures allow landscape to flow through the campus, creating outdoor rooms that extend functional program beyond interior walls. Materials including stone, wood, glass, and metal combine in configurations that respond to specific functions, producing what the design team describes as different temperaments across the complex. The heavy permanence of stone meets the permeability of glass, generating rich textures animated by shifting light throughout the day. When prospective employees visit, they encounter a physical demonstration of values in action: a company that claims to respect its environment and proves the claim through built reality.
The Xinhe Group Headquarters illustrates a transferable principle for any enterprise: before asking what your building should look like, ask what your site already knows. Ecological, historical, and cultural narratives embedded in land can become the foundation for architecture that feels inevitable rather than imposed. The most resonant corporate spaces emerge when designers listen before they draw.
