![](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/mv1-scaled.jpg)
Construction has been completed on Shenzhen’s Women & Children’s Centre, a previously unoccupied 100m-tall tower that has been transformed into a colourful skyscraper by Dutch architect MVRDV.
Originally opened in 1994, the tower remained empty due to fire safety concerns, although shops in its plinth opened in 2002.
![](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/mv2.jpg)
The Shenzhen Women & Children’s Centre contains a hotel, library, auditorium, children’s theatre and “discovery hall”, therapy rooms and offices for staff.
The tower’s façade is clad in multi-coloured, metre-long frames that provide extra shading to reduce solar gain and contain inside panels for better ventilation.
![](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/mv3.jpg)
The façade’s yellow, orange, pink and green colours are mirrored in the interior, allowing for visitors to navigate easily.
The tower’s crown has been transformed into a large terrace and the courtyard has been changed from a car park into a public space with a food court.
The entrance to the city’s metro was on street level but has been moved inside the building, freeing up the pavement outside.
![](https://www.globalconstructionreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/mv4.jpg)
Jacob van Rijs, MVRDV’s co-founder, said: “With the city’s fast-paced growth, many existing buildings were not really designed to have a long lifespan. That is a recipe for either an epidemic of demolition or, ideally, a great wave of adaptive reuse.
“Showing that even the most inadequate of these structures can be reused could save a crazy amount of concrete going to landfill – and eliminate millions of tonnes of carbon emissions that would have been created replacing that concrete.”