The city of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang province, sits at the mouth of China’s Qiantang River, and, like other metropolises across the country, it has undergone exponential population growth over the last several decades, now at some 11 million residents. Having risen from approximately 600,000 in 1950, it developed along the way a panoply of skyscrapers, as well as a campus of parks and stadiums to support last year’s Asian Games. The Hangzhou Century Center, designed by SOM for developer Greenland Holdings, is one such project that—as a two-towered 1,000-foot-tall structure connected by a sweeping midsection—demands attention, especially with a spectacular lighting array that emblazons its sinuous form against the night sky.
The Center, which contains offices, a hotel, and residences, is a linchpin for Qianjing Century City, a new nine-square-mile mixed-use district that incorporates the Asian Games sports infrastructure. Clad with a diaphanous glass veil that is suspended over the unitized glass curtain wall at the tower base and then merges into the fully enclosed facade as it arches upward, the supertall acts as a metaphorical and physical curtain opening to that urban scene. This outward-facing role is strengthened by the publicly accessible skybridge linking the two towers near their bases and by the more than 6,000 color-changing LEDs integrated into the glazing system on the internal face of the tower elevations.
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