Wolf D. Prix's workshop won the competition for the design of the MCC back in 2008. The eight-storey building with an area of more than 90,000 m2 seems grandiose even taking into account the Chinese architectural and construction megalomania. Its construction required 40,000 tons of steel, not to mention concrete. The resulting volume of complex curvilinear shape is located on a plot of 40,000 m2 in the port area. Its main entrance faces the sea because the city's municipality cherishes the dream of building an international cruise terminal nearby, which will be spatially connected to the conference center.
The building of the MCC was originally conceived as a tourist attraction: its architecture is designed to capture the imagination of the viewer. The facades are covered with numerous creases, folds, roundness, depressions, and the rising ridges of the outer faceted membrane suddenly come to naught, forming a plane with an inverse angle of inclination. By the way, technologies used in shipbuilding were used for the exterior decoration of the building. The cantilevered volumes seem to be trying to break the steel cladding of the building: this is how the architects played with the need to "open" the outer cover to provide natural lighting for the halls. The angle of inclination of the membrane "flakes" is different, it depends on the location of the light slit on the facade, and all angles were calculated on a computer using a special parametric program. Building height - 60 m, length - 220 m, width - 200 m.
The frame consists of two horizontal elements ("table" and "roof") and 14 combined vertical supports. The lower part of the frame, the "table", is raised from the ground level to a height of 7 m. The self-supporting structure allowed architects to design large spans (up to 85 m) and long consoles.
The layout of the MCC and its internal structure obey the urban planning logic: in the center of the interior “quarter” there are two large volumes - a conference hall for 2500 people and a multifunctional theater hall for 1600 people. This block is surrounded by two "streets", that is, the portals of the front foyer. Around the central block to the right and left, surrounding it along the perimeter, six smaller conference rooms are designed for an audience of 300 to 600 people. It is these volumes that "break through" through the facade, forming consoles. Thus, in the interior, we got an urban spatial link "square - two streets - two rows of houses", which can be found in any old European city, take the same native Vienna for Coop Himmelb (l) au.
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