The International Youth Cultural Center was originally built for the 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games in Nanjing. In 2018, it completely switched to the "legacy" mode, that is, into a post-sports use scheme: a 5-star hotel of the Jumeirah Hotels chain with 300 rooms was opened in it. The hotel occupies the top (41st to 68th floors) of a 315-meter tower, which is also the tallest skyscraper built to date by Zaha Hadid Architects. Below there are offices, and the adjacent 255-meter building accommodates 1000 rooms of a 4-star hotel, designed for guests of the conference center. The size of the site is 5.2 hectares, the total area of the complex is 465 thousand m2, of which 100,000 m2 are underground premises.
The conference center smooths, according to the authors, the transition from a horizontal landscape - a park on the banks of the Yangtze - to high-rise buildings. It houses a conference hall (2,100 seats), a concert hall (500 spectators) and a multifunctional hall, meeting rooms and other smaller halls, a restaurant, and shops. The purpose of the building is to serve, among other things, as the venue for the annual party conventions of Jiangsu Province. The four key parts of the center at ground level are separated to allow passage underneath; above they merge into a complex shape, which the architects compare with the yunjin brocade pattern, which has been woven in Nanjing for many centuries, as well as with calligraphy. The steel supporting frame is supplemented with reinforced concrete, and the interior uses fiberglass-reinforced plasterboard panels.
Zaha Hadid Architects entered a closed competition for the design of the complex in 2011, when there was very little time left before the Youth Olympics. The situation was aggravated by the construction next to the site of two tunnels and a pedestrian bridge across the Yangtze, leading to the island of Jiangxinzhou, an important recreational area. At that moment, Olympic facilities were being created around, but in general this territory - the so-called New City of Hexi - includes the Central Business District, parks, and residential buildings, which should ensure its development after the Games.
Lack of time and active construction around forced the design and construction of the International Youth Center at the same time: 34 months passed from the moment the ZHA order was received to its opening in a "sports" quality, the actual work on the site took a year and a half. The structure was built simultaneously from top to bottom and from bottom to top, because its underground part reaches significant dimensions. In six months, it took 717 bored piles to be driven in, in total there were 6235 piles, of which more than half were steel. The facades are made of more than 12 thousand glass fiber reinforced concrete panels (2 x 3 meters). Despite their “parametric” profile, the construction was carried out quickly thanks to the use of the same programs by architects and contractors, which made it possible to digitally manufacture the formwork of the required form immediately upon receipt of the next portion of the drawings. The BIM model also saved time.
