Business & Labor
SOM designs three towers in Nanjing
(archrecord.construction.com - 06/13/05)
By Sam
Lubell
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| The
Jinao building (right) will rise 232 meters high; the
Greenland project (left) will have three towers. |
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.
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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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