By Sam Lubell
Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill, which is already working on more than 50 architecture and planning projects in China, has made the country a laboratory for tall building design, with ambitious structures in major cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong.
But the firm is also constructing skyscrapers in less prominent markets, like Nanjing, where it has three underway: the Jinao Tower, an office and hotel complex; Nanjing Greenland, a project of high rise offices, hotels, and apartments; and the Jinling Hotel [Record, March 2004, p. 111], a 320-meter tall, twisting hotel, apartment, and office building.
“About three or four years ago we heard from Chinese officials there was going to be a real push: that the government was trying to distribute improvements across the country. Nanjing is definitely part of that push,” says SOM design partner Brian Lee, describing why so many large-scale projects are happening all at once.
The 232 meter-high Jinao, which is scheduled to be completed in 2007, will be located in a developing area of the city that includes a new city hall, convention center, and athletic complex. The building features a glass facade that alternately folds inward and outward, articulating a dynamic sense of movement. The form, notes Lee, grows out of the structure’s diagonal grid bracing system, a particularly efficient support for lateral load. Similar systems are used in SOM’s John Hancock Tower in Chicago, and Norman Foster’s Hearst building in New York City. The building’s double-skin surface, Lee adds, will provide solar shading and create an insulating climate chamber that reduces temperatures inside the building.
Located about five miles from Jinao, in the city’s central business district, Nanjing Greenland will be a complex of three steel-frame and concrete-core glass towers. The tallest building, at least 300 meters tall (making it one of the tallest in China), will include a faceted glass surface imbedded with irregularly spaced slots for greenspace that “march vertically up the facade,” describes SOM partner Thomas Kerwin. The other towers, about 100 meters tall, will include roof gardens and a sunken green square.
“We hope to intertwine the landscape of Nanjing with the building, and let it touch people at higher levels,” says Kerwin.
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