| Shanghai World Financial Center Shanghai, China |
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"The
show-stopping 95 storey World Financial Centre, is an original solution,
which is already influencing other designs even before it is
built." Ralph Thomas, World Architecture, March 1998 "Quietly distinctive." Michael Maynard, Architecture, November 1997 When it is completed, the Shanghai World Financial Center will stand as the tallest building in the world. The project is located on a key site in the Lujiazhui financial and trade district in Pudong, which the Chinese government has designated as an Asian center for international banking and commercial interests. The rapid development of the zone has inevitably resulted in a disjunctive urban fabric to which the design of the tower reacts in its great monolithic simplicity. The program of this 95-story project is contained within two distinctly formal elements: a sculpted tower and a podium. Corresponding to the Chinese conception of the earth as a square and the sky as a circle, the interaction between these two geometric forms gives shape to the tower. The project relates to its context through an abstract language that attempts to symbolically incorporate characteristics meaningful to the traditions of Chinese architecture, but is not limited to pictorial or image-based historical precedents. The primary form of the tower is devised as a square prism intersected by two sweeping arcs, tapering into a single line at the apex. The gradual progression of floor plans generates configurations which are ideal for offices on the lower floors and hotel suites above. At the same time, the transformation of the plan rotates the orientation of the upper portion of the tower toward the Oriental Pearl TV tower, the area's dominant landmark, a fifth of a mile away. To relieve wind pressure, a 164-foot (50 meter) cylinder is carved out of the top of the building. Equal in diameter to the sphere of the television tower, this void connects the two structures across the urban landscape. Wall, wing and conical forms penetrate through the massive stone base of the tower. The varied geometries of these smaller elements lend human scale, and organize the complexities of pedestrian movement at the point of entry, complimenting the elemental form of the tower.
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