Among SOM's many current— projects is an office and hotel complex in Shenzhen, China, now under construction for the Shen Ye Land Company and slated to be complete by mid-2017. To deliver the desired openness within a pristine envelope, the architects designed two towers—one 984 feet tall and the other 1,276 feet tall—each with a reinforced-concrete core and minimal perimeter structure, enclosed in large expanses of glass.
The buildings' typical vision-glass panel will be about 77 square feet—slightly larger than what is considered the maximum for standard-sized insulated glazing units (IGUs), says Holt. Instead of using tall and narrow IGUs to span from one floor to another, the design team specified a wider but shorter insulated unit, 9 feet, 10' inches wide by 7 feet, 10½ inches high. Made up of a laminated outer lite and a fully tempered inner lite, the vision glass will be positioned between a skinny lower lite and a highly insulated spandrel panel. 'Instead of thinking vertically, we turned the module on its side,' Holt says, to provide a wider field of vision for occupants.
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