Qintai Center, Wuhan, China

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill win contest for Qintai Center with guzheng-inspired design

Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture has won an international competition to design Qintai Center, a 248m (814ft) tall, high-performance corporate headquarters tower and related podium structure in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. AS+GG’s winning entry was selected over competing schemes from firms based in the Netherlands, Japan and Hong Kong.

Qintai Center’s total constructed area is 146,000 sq m, including a 5-star hotel and office space to be occupied by the client, Hubei Tobacco Company, and other tenants. The tower will be connected via a plaza and an above-grade pedestrian bridge to the podium, which will contain retail, restaurants and a conference centre with a ballroom. At the top of the tower, a special executive lounge and restaurants will offer spectacular views of the surrounding cityscape. The tower’s unique form is both culturally and environmentally contextual to the city of Wuhan.

“The genesis of the form in the competition phase related to the guzheng, a traditional Chinese musical instrument similar to a zither, featuring strings that are stretched over pegs that form a raised S curve over a rectangular wooden frame,” notes Adrian Smith, FAIA, RIBA. “The instrument is similar to the one featured in a Chinese legend with deep significance to the culture of Hubei, which in turn inspired our design process early on.”

During the ongoing concept design phase, the cultural influence of the building has been developed in relation to the building’s energy performance. Informed by a rigorous parametric analysis, the façade now bows outward in a diagonal line that ascends northwest up the tower. This shape has been adjusted to optimize self-shading and minimise solar heat gain, an effect augmented by the fact that both the tower and podium’s narrowest exposures are mostly to the east and west, from which the sun is harshest. In addition, the tower’s smaller floor plates allow for greater use of daylight harvesting, which in turn reduces the building’s energy consumption for artificial lighting.

“Our initial reference of Qintai Center in relation to a musical instrument has been refined with the building’s performance in mind,” says Gordon Gill, AIA. “Now the building has matured to have its own specific language tied to a broader environment context while still maintaining the cultural reference of the guzheng. In that sense, it’s an advancement of our firm’s continuing investigation into the relation of architectural form and sustainability, a concept summed up by the phrase ‘form follows performance.’”

Qintai Center is oriented to maximise views of Wuhan’s great bodies of water, including Moon Lake to the east and the nearby Hanshui River to the north. The building will also enjoy a perspective of the AS+GG-designed Wuhan Greenland Center, a supertall tower now in the early stages of construction about five miles from the Qintai site.
The cultural importance of Moon Lake and the city’s three rivers are emphasised on Qintai Center’s 25,863 sq m site by a series of pools and other water features that surround the tower and podium. The water features are also performative elements of the design, making the air feel fresher to building users in Wuhan’s hot climate. Water for these elements will come from stormwater and/or recovered condensate from the complex.

Suzhon Center, Chine

Greenland Group's Suzhou Center in Wujiang, China

 

 

The Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) announced that it has won an international competition to design the Greenland Group Suzhou Center, on Taihu Lake in Wujiang, China, reports Dezeen. The 358-meter supertall tower will top out at 75 stories and will contain a mixed-use program that could comprise a small city--with office, apartments, hotel, and retail uses on site. 

The most striking feature of the exterior design is the 30-story high operable window that spans the hotel and residential floors.

The building also features an atrium in the center of the building that separated the east and west side of the building and functioning as a ventilation channel. According to Luke Leung, SOM Director of Sustainable and MEP Engineering: “The design of the Greenland Group Suzhou Center utilizes an atrium as the ‘lung’ of the building to provide ventilation and will incorporate a series of high efficiency measures with the objective to achieve a 60% savings in energy consumption compared to a conventional US high rise and a 60% reduction in potable water use.”

The building’s expansive lobby is a result of the building a novel approach maximizing the efficiency of the building structure:  “[the] unique split-core configuration of the upper floors increases the efficiency of the building structure. By placing half of the building core program on each side of the lobby and interconnecting them with structural steel braces, the combined core becomes more effective than a typical center core system while also creating a dramatic tall lobby space within.”

SOM also recently announced the opening of a new design studio in Downtown Los Angeles as part of the firm's West Coast practice. Michael Mann, FAIA; Paul Danna, AIA; and Jose Luis Palacios, AIA will lead the new studio--all three come from AECOM but all three also worked for SOM in the past. 

TAIYUAN MUSEUM CHINA

Taiyuan, China 2007-2009

The Taiyuan Museum of Art works as a cluster of buildings unified by continuous and discontinuous promenades both inside and outside. The building responds to the urban parkscape in which it is set; visitors are encouraged to pass through the building while not entering into the museum itself. An exterior ramp threading through the building connects the heterogeneous hardscapes, lawns and sculpture gardens. The integration of building and landscape registers multiple scales of territory ranging from the enormity of the adjacent Fen River to the intimacy of the museum's own particular spatial episodes.

Inside, the security of museum space is maintained by a highly controlled interface between gallery and non-gallery programs including an auditorium, bookstore, restaurant, library, education center, and administrative wing. The individual sets of elevators and cores are distributed to guarantee easy access and easy divisibility between zones regulated by different schedules and rules of access. At the garage level, the services are intricately planned in order not to interfere with parking lots for staff and public.

The museum galleries are organized to ensure maximum curatorial flexibility. The galleries can be organized into a single, spiraling sequence for large chronological exhibitions or into autonomous clusters operating independently. For visitors architectural cues offer - the placement of ramps and portals, the expansion and contraction of space - provide a means of wayfinding. The building gives visitors the freedom either to follow a predetermined chronological sequence or to skip from one set of galleries to another, in a nonlinear fashion.

Exterior light weight honeycomb panels with stone veneer produce an evocative and elusive material effect and the perception of an exceptional scale. The panels are reflective as if metallic, seemingly too large to be stone panels, but clearly possessing the properties of both materials. Advanced parametric software allowed panels to conform to standard widths, reducing material waste.

Wuxi Xidong Park Bridge design by L&A Design Group

L&A Design Group has developed an exciting contemporary bridge design as an architectural highlight of Wuxi Xidong Park, located in Jiangsu province, China. The bridge is planned to be the main connection between the north and south foreshores of the parks lake and allows visitors access to a small island destination that commands views over the water as well as café facilities and pocket gardens. More images and architects’ description after the break.

Courtesy of L&A Design Group

The important position, jutting out over the central water body, encouraged a dynamic design response. The design team has envisioned a signature iconic structure that is attractive, has a flowing modern form expressing the importance of Wuxi’s relationship with water and is functional in its connections to the island, foreshores and allowing boats to pass underneath its elevation.

Courtesy of L&A Design Group

Designed as a whole volume, the bridge presents unique curves and a platform that widens as the bridge crosses the island. The platform creates a focus for the bridge maximizing views out across the lake under a shaded canopy, integrates ramp access to the island and forms an intimate space for the cafe underneath.

Courtesy of L&A Design Group

To reduce the long linear scale of the bridge an “S” shape plan was created to provide closer vistas for people accessing the park from both sides of the lake. It is a bridge with a ‘twist’. As the bridge reaches its island destination the shape stimulates a dramatic interaction between architecture, landscape and water. Construction will utilize lightweight steel structures, light colored outer panel skins for a sleek look that can be elegantly lit up at night and polished timber detailing to tactile surfaces such as seating and railing.
Architects: L&A Design Group
Location: Wuxi, China
Project Team: Sean Shi, Kevin Wang, Liang Meng, Ning Ye
Client: Wuxi High-speed Railway Commercial Zone Committee
Project Year: 2011

Haikou Tower - China - German Architect

Hann architekten -  HAIKOU  TOWER

German practice henn architekten has been awarded first prize for the 'haikou tower' proposal for haikou, the business district within the capital city of hainan, china. Ten towers ranging in height from 150 to 450 meters will be divided by a linear axis,
arranged to face each other in two parallel rows. The program will provide 1.5 million square meters distributed between low rise towers and increase in size culminating with two focal towers which frame a central plaza. Office towers are interconnected  with undulating podiums to incorporate commercial spaces and public courtyards with lush green areas and water features.

The large tower contains the office and hotel program which dictates a different structural system within the form to accommodate the shifting use of interior space. The need for column free areas within the office levels require a series of eight mega-columns
and substantial core to direct vertical loads to foundations and to allow long span floor plates. Large braces distribute the lateral loads from wind and earthquakes. The hotel portion located at the upper thirty levels is supported with a exposed outrigger truss
which becomes incorporated into the lobby experience. The dominant element marks the building's change in function for visitors.  Unobstructed views are maintained with minimal bracing at the perimeter glass while a sky lobby and observation deck are placed
at the pinnacle of the skyscraper. A panel unit curtain wall contains a 'folded' module that blocks direct sunlight and solar gain. This outer skin's creases augment in acuteness at higher points on the facade, finishing at an angle measurement of 30 degrees. The top half is comprised of opaque spandrel glass with integrated photovoltaic cells to produce energy while light is introduced through the bottom portion of  transparent glass.






















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project info:


client: Hainan airline group
location: Haikou, China
program: office, hotel, conference, commercial
area: 320,000 sqm
status: competition 1st prize
design team: Henn studioB
Leander Adrian, Daniel da Rocha, Martin Henn, Kaowen Ho, Markus Jacobi,
Aata Kycia, Paul Langley, Klaus Ransmayr, Max Schwitalla, Wei Sun, Xin Wang, Mu Xingyu
local partner: IPPR international engineering corporation, Beijing, Haikou

consultants: Arup, London, Shanghai