The complex with a total area of 120,000 m2 is being built in the southern part of Chaoyang Park, one of the "youngest" and largest parks in Beijing. It will include office, retail and residential buildings, and the architects based the architectural design of these structures on the theme of shan-shui, a genre of traditional Chinese painting dedicated to the image of mountains and waters.
The dominant feature of the complex will be two 120-meter high skyscrapers, which the architects give expressive flowing outlines. Fully glazed facades feature deep folds and grooves across the entire height of the buildings, symbolizing the transformations that rock formations inevitably undergo under the influence of wind and water.
Four lower office blocks will be located between the skyscrapers. Their sloping shape is designed to resemble river stones polished with water. Residential buildings, in turn, are terraced volumes immersed in greenery, symbolizing forest thickets stretching between the mountains. “By rethinking the traditional subjects of shan-shui painting by means of architecture, we are achieving a qualitatively new union of natural and urban landscape,” the MAD bureau is confident.
To make the boundary between the natural landscape and man-made volumes even more conditional, the solution of interiors, into which architects also actively introduce greenery, stones and water, will help. In particular, the skyscrapers will be connected by a 17-meter-high entrance lobby, one of the key design elements of which will be a waterfall, and green observation platforms will be arranged on the upper floors of the towers.
Thanks to the energy efficient technologies used, this project claims to be a LEED Gold Certification. However, the architects themselves consider their main achievement not even the use of "green" solutions, but the very attempt to rethink the image of a multifunctional complex: located in the business district of a huge metropolis, it will not represent the usual heap of concrete and glass boxes, but a symbiosis of architecture and nature.
The construction of the complex is planned to be completed in 2016.
