The Canton Tower Building

The Canton Tower Building

The Canton Tower by Information Based Architecture, is Guangzhou’s most important new building and will represent the 10 million inhabitants counting metropolis as a cool, progressive and exciting city.

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The Canton Tower Building

Architects: Information Based Architecture
Area: 114000 m²
Year: 2010

 

The Canton Tower BuildingMark Hemel, IBA architect and director, comments, “ Where most skyscrapers bear ‘male’ features; being introvert, strong, straight, rectangular, and based on repetition, we wanted to create a ‘female’ tower, being complex, transparent, curvy, gracious and sexy. Our aim was to design a free-form tower with a rich and human-like identity that would represent Guangzhou as a dynamic and exciting city.” The result is a tower, very slender and tall, that bears similarities with the figure of a female, the very reason that earned the nickname: ‘super-model‘.”

The Canton Tower BuildingThe idea of the tower is simple. The form, volume and structure is generated by two ellipses, one at foundation level and the other at a horizontal plane at 450 metres. These two ellipses are rotated relative to another. The tightening caused by the rotation between the two ellipses forms a ‘waist’ and a densification of material.

The Canton Tower BuildingThe structure consist of a open lattice-structure, built up from 1100 nodes and the same amount of connecting ring- and bracing pieces. Basically the tower can be seen as a giant 3 dimensional puzzle of which all 3300 pieces are totally unique. Architect Mark Hemel comments: “Recent State of the Art fabrication and computerized analysis techniques allow designers to create much more complex structures then ever before.

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