Concord World Financial Center
A base-and-tower skyscraper of the kind that has become all but ubiquitous in fast-growing Asian cities, Arquitectonica’s combined retail, office, hospitality and residential tower in southwestern China attempts to soften the sometimes harshly synthetic typology through key enhancements to both its program and its aesthetic. In the base structure, a giant winter garden alive with plant life gives users an all-weather indoor park; the rooftop observation deck is likewise dense with greenery, turning the whole building into a vertical oasis in the middle of the teeming metropolis. Structurally, the tower stands out for its near-total lack of standard floors, each floor plate being slightly different in size, resulting in a wavering outline that seems almost to diffuse into the air at its peak.
As impressive as the form itself is what wraps around it: the cladding system that creeps up the serrated frame of the spire is a multi-faceted patchwork of glass tesserae, each deflected at a discrete angle. This glittering, crystalline facade sets up a clear dialogue with the similarly wrought envelope of the winter garden, lending some rarely seen unity to the base and tower halves of the popular urban type. Even better, the two together strongly suggest a distinct romantic image — a rocket readying for takeoff, leaving behind it clouds of smoke — truly putting the “boom” into China’s building boom.
