OMA‘s Hangzhou Prism, completed in Hangzhou’s Future Tech City district for developer Xinhu Real Estate Group, did not begin as a singular form — it began as a cluster of typical residential towers that were collapsed into a single, porous volume. The result is OMA’s first built project in Hangzhou: a 43,000-square-meter mixed-use structure whose two oblique cuts through its mass produce a silhouette that reads differently from every direction, and a civic interior that belongs to the city as much as to its residents.
Two diagonal incisions define the Prism’s most immediate reading. The cuts are not arbitrary — they are directional, aligned to connect the building visually with the new high-speed rail station to the northwest and a park to the southeast. The geometry performs orientation: the Hangzhou Prism does not simply occupy its site, it acknowledges the infrastructure around it and draws those vectors into its own form.
A large exterior atrium at the building’s base constitutes the civic core of the intervention. Publicly accessible from the surrounding streets, canal, and park, the atrium functions as an urban room — a space sized and programmed for both spontaneous occupation and organized events. This is where OMA‘s most specific ambition becomes spatial: the boundary between private program and public realm is not managed through regulation or signage but dissolved through section.
The program distribution reveals where the project’s real weight lies. Of the 43,000 square meters, hotel accounts for 20,000 — nearly half the total area — with residential at 10,000, commercial at 8,000, and offices at just 5,000. This is not a residential tower with amenities attached; it is fundamentally a mixed-use hospitality complex in which living and working are the supporting cast. The balance is deliberate: in a district still establishing its identity, the hotel provides the density of activity that a purely residential program could never generate.
The elevated loft units offer exclusivity and panoramic views across Hangzhou and the surrounding landscape, while the garden level and communal floors enable interaction between residents, hotel guests, workers, and visitors. Collective spaces are embedded throughout rather than concentrated at a single level — the Hangzhou Future Tech City development demanded exactly this: a building that operates as a three-dimensional neighborhood distributed across its full section.
Individual terraces punctuate the loft levels, each providing private outdoor space carved directly from the oblique cuts through the Prism’s volume. These are not balconies appended to a facade — they are residual spaces produced by the incisions, each oriented differently depending on its position within the silhouette. The terraces make the building’s geometry legible from the inside: the inhabitant experiences the cut as a private garden rather than a formal device.
Chris van Duijn, OMA Partner and lead on the project alongside project architect Michael Hadjistyllis, frames the ambition precisely: “A cluster of typical residential towers was transformed into this single, porous structure, creating a three-dimensional village for young professionals and visitors,” he said. “It is a design that maximizes synergy and interaction with opportunities for events, community, and fun.”
Future Tech City provided both the brief and the pressure. The context demanded a building that could perform as landmark while resisting the isolation typical of prestige towers. The Prism responds by making its ground floor a public commons and its upper floors a sequence of interconnected communities. The approach shares certain instincts with OMA‘s recent work on the Edo-Tokyo Museum renovation, where Shohei Shigematsu similarly refused the separation between institution and city, treating the building’s ground condition as a civic threshold rather than a controlled entrance.
Ten years in development — from concept in 2016 to completion in 2026 — the OMA Hangzhou mixed-use development arrives at a moment when Future Tech City has already established its urban character. The Prism no longer needs to define the district; it needs to anchor it. The oblique apex that terminates the geometry gives the building its skyline identity without resorting to the decorative crowns typical of contemporary Chinese mixed-use architecture — the silhouette is the direct consequence of the section, and that consistency between decision and form is what distinguishes the Prism from the towers it replaced.