Architecture News Plus (ANP) – Architecture and Design Magazine

Zhiye Plaza Office Tower

This is a project by KlingStubbins and it is located at Jiangsu Province, China. Project's program: Office building. There are sixteen images for Zhiye Plaza Office Tower.

: © Shen Zhongai

Project details

Project name: Zhiye Plaza Office Tower
Location: Jiangsu Province, China
Program: Office building
Area: Site area: 538,000 sf
Year: Completion: 2006
More details: Stories: 18
Client: China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park Land Co., Ltd.
Project by: KlingStubbins
Team: Principal designer: Bradford White Fiske • Design team: B. Fiske (Senior ADP), S. Hu (Project Design Architect), A. Cavallero (Project Design Architect), T. Jung (Project Design Architect), J. Yu (Project Design Architect), R. Ashworth(Project Architect), S. Son (Architecture), M. Narisaranukul (Architecture), J. Castner (Chief, Architecture), L. Diaz (ADP), B. Bu (Architect), D. Carlson (landscape), M. Clair (PD)
Others: Construction Manager: Shanghai Jia-Shi Group, Ltd.

Project images

Designer's statement

The first-place winner of an international design competition, this 50,000-SM (538,000-SF) office tower represents design predicated on the careful balance of local cultural, environmental, and historical conditions, and the technologically sophisticated requirements of today’s office environments. It is respectful to Suzhou’s landscape traditions and overtly responsive to its history of waterways and the manner in which they have been interwoven with elements of architecture.

An elegant, memorable, and clear form, the corporate / developer structure defines a new gateway for the administrative district within the 70,000,000-SM (753,000,000-SF) park. The tower and plinth delimit an urban edge and present a grand public entrance to the south, as tradition dictates, while also sheltering an intimate landscaped park and more active entrance to the north. Access to 15,000 SM (161,000 SF) of underground parking is carefully incised into this primarily pedestrian environment.

The 18-story slab’s enclosure is composed of clear and silk-screened low-E glazing customized for the solar orientation; the south façade adds 300-mm sunshades, the east and west orientations employ vertical fins, while the north façade is as planar as possible in response to the plinth’s complexity and reflects the adjacent gardens and river. The building vocabulary is one of surfaces and events; balconies, roof extensions, and vertical mesh-covered armatures act as counterpoints to the sheer glass backdrop. The sun, sky, and clouds endlessly repaint the building’s surfaces and shift the degrees of transparency and reflectivity. Day or night, the design celebrates the interplay of light and shadow.

A stone rainscreen wall and roof embrace the three-story base that holds areas of dining, exhibition, and congregation. A four-story lobby and three-story linear atrium are the primary public spaces and are predicated on views to the outside where linear reflecting pools, fountains, planting, and stone reinterpret the area’s gardens. Tensile-structured curtain walls and polished floors, soffits, and interior walls that create layers of reflectivity intentionally blend boundaries between natural and constructed environments.

The realized facility is at the forefront of office design within this rapidly growing international city.