Tuesday · August · 11 · 2026
“You can never plan the future by the past.”
— Edmund Burke
Sun & daylight
The sun rises at 06:00 and sets at 19:00 in Shenzhen today, giving 13h 0m of daylight. Solar noon is at 12:30.
06:00
Sunrise
12:30
Noon
19:00
Sunset
Midnight
00:30
Sunrise
06:00
Solar noon
12:30
Sunset
19:00
Solar midnight
00:30
Daylight
13h 0m
Daylight runs about 13h 30m around the June solstice and 10h 45m around the December solstice.
Daylight saving time
Shenzhen does not observe daylight saving time. Clocks stay on UTC+8 all year, so the local time never shifts with the seasons.
Public holidays
China has 1 public holiday in August 2026.
Architecture
Shenzhen was a county of fishing and farming villages until 1980 and has been under construction since, so almost nothing here is older than the people using it. The city buys its landmark buildings from abroad and its housing from a standard plan.
Completed 2017
Fumihiko Maki
A museum and cultural centre at the water in Shekou, and Maki's only building in China. He set a low sculptural podium on the ground and cantilevered three volumes out of the roof, each aimed at a different thing: the sea, the mountains and the city. The podium roof is a public park with no closing time. The three cantilevers are the building's argument about where a cultural institution in a new city should be looking.
Completed 2017
Kohn Pedersen Fox
An office tower in Futian, on eight composite megacolumns that run the full height of the shaft. KPF tapered the faces so the plan narrows as it rises and wind loads fall by about a third, then clad the columns and crown in stainless steel chosen to survive the salt air without changing colour. The corners chamfer into a pyramid at the top. The structure is entirely legible from outside, which is unusual at this height and is the tower's only ornament.
Completed 2016
Coop Himmelb(l)au
Two institutions in one envelope in the Futian cultural district: a contemporary art museum and a city planning exhibition. Coop Himmelb(l)au kept the two as separate rectangular volumes and joined them with a chromed free-form blob suspended in the lobby between them, which holds the shared entrance, the shops and the vertical circulation. Stone louvres and insulated glass wrap the whole thing. The plan solves the problem of a shared building by making the shared part the only shape in it.
Completed 2013
Rem Koolhaas
The headquarters of the exchange, a tower with its podium lifted thirty-six metres into the air. Koolhaas took the base that would normally sit on the ground, three storeys of trading floors, and pushed it up the shaft as a cantilever projecting more than fifty metres, leaving a covered plaza underneath. The roof of the raised podium is a garden. It is a picture of a market floating free of the real economy, commissioned by the market it describes.
Completed 2006
Arata Isozaki
A public library on the civic axis in Futian, built as a pair with a concert hall. Isozaki hung a glass wall from a black steel frame across the front and set a forest of thin branching columns behind it, so the reading floors look out through a screen of structure. Library and hall face each other across a plaza in one language of frame and glass. It was among the first to treat the new centre as a composition rather than a set of plots.