Shenzhen Energy Mansion — Stone for BIG's Pleated Towers

Project Overview

StoneWhite supplied stone cladding for ground-plane lobbies, lift cores and signature wall planes of Shenzhen Energy Mansion — the 220-metre and 110-metre tower pair designed by BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group) for the state-owned Shenzhen Energy Company in the city's central business district.

Completed in 2018, the towers are wrapped in a pleated, climate-responsive curtain wall — opaque panels angled to block direct sun, transparent panels oriented to capture diffuse light and views. Inside, the stone program had to hold the ground plane against that folded façade, and carry through the lift cores up into the tenant lobbies.

Design Intent

The stone at ground plane had to hold its own against BIG's pleated curtain wall — quiet enough to recede behind the folded glazing geometry, dense enough to read as mass when standing in the lobby. The façade is the project's loudest gesture; the stone is its counterweight.

"On a BIG project, the envelope sets the tempo. The interior stone has to defer to the façade and still anchor the room."

Material — Daphne White (Dandong, China)

The specified stone was Daphne White — a cream-white marble quarried in Dandong, Liaoning Province, on China's north-east border with North Korea. The Dandong field produces some of the country's calmest white marbles: soft cream ground, fine grey-beige threading, occasional warm mineral veins. On a cross-cut it reads almost cloud-like; on a vein-cut the threading runs in clear directional bands.

Dandong was the right origin for this project because the colour temperature — warm cream rather than blue-white — sits comfortably under the warm-white LED bands BIG specified at the lift cores, and the muted veining holds quiet against the folded façade above. Sourcing inside China also tightened the loop with the polishing factories in Shuitou and the site team in Shenzhen, removing one ocean from the schedule.

Material Selection

Cross-cut block selection produced a calm, cloud-like field across the lobby walls. Bookmatched layouts were detailed at the lift cores so vertical pairs resolved cleanly under the recessed lighting bands. Outliers with strong directional veining were rejected at the quarry — they would have fought the curtain wall instead of receding.

Slab numbering was committed before the first pass on the gang saw, with vein pairs reserved for the lift-core elevations and quieter stocks routed to back-of-house and circulation. Two material families were coordinated as a single palette so the transition from lobby to lift core read as one continuous surface.

A Summer at the Quarry Mouth

"Hu, our project lead, spent three consecutive weeks at the quarry mouth that July — through 35 °C days and dust that never settles. She slept in a guesthouse ten minutes from the pit, woke at dawn, and walked the terraces until the light flattened."

The selection criteria were unforgiving: blocks had to be quiet enough for the lift cores, warm enough for the LED wash, and consistent enough that the lobby would read as a single carved surface. Out of every hundred blocks exposed, only a handful carried the right balance of cream ground and grey-beige threading. Hu marked each candidate with chalk, photographed the face from three angles, and cross-referenced the seam map with the quarry geologist before releasing it to the gang-saw list.

By the end of the third week she could read the pit wall like a topographic map — knew which benches produced the warmest tone, which fault lines to avoid, and which season's extraction left the cleanest stone. The blocks she approved that summer became the lift-core walls that now hold the ground plane of Shenzhen's most talked-about tower pair.

Fabrication & Sourcing

Cutting was phased across the podium link, ground lobbies and tower lift lobbies on a tight handover window. Each batch was approved against a physical reference panel on the polishing floor in Shuitou before crating, then sequenced into containers by install order so the first container off the truck served the first zone on the program.

On-site, a single point of approval handled colour and bookmatch sign-off against the curtain-wall mock-up panels, removing the back-and-forth that typically slows down podium-to-tower transitions on headquarters work.