Büro Ole Scheeren Wins Competition to Design Octagonal “Super-Tall” Tower in China

Büro Ole Scheeren Wins Competition to Design Octagonal “Super-Tall” Tower in China

Büro Ole Scheeren has won an international design competition to build the 350-meter Nanjing Jiangbei New Financial Center Tower in China. The octagonal-silhouette skyscraper merges local tradition and culture within a mixed-use structure, aiming to become an iconic symbol of Nanjing’s new urban identity.

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Nanjing, one of China’s bustling trading centers located on the shores of the Yangze River, is a city with a dual identity: a historic center and a contemporary urban center called the Jiangbei District, which integrates culture, tradition, identity, ecology, nature, and innovation. The firm’s winning design, dubbed the Nanjing Nexus, was chosen for acknowledging the city’s futuristic visions and relationship between local culture, landscape, and the river; Its architecture “connects the past with the challenges and expectations of the future”.

Through the tower’s architecture, Ole Scheeren was able to converge history and modernity, and create a dialogue between the city’s small scale historic village and the large scale towers of the contemporary city. The tower’s design reimagines the typical rectangular tower by trimming the shaft into an octagon and carving each facet into a concave bay. The eight bays are split horizontally split and shifted to create offsets with large “Urban Windows” that open up to accommodate diverse programs.

The building’s octagonal form offers tenants highly efficient floor plans and clearly structured programming. Office spaces are zoned into four standardized rectangular Work Clusters, complemented with four diagonally rotated interactive Innovation Bays. At the top of the tower, a hotel benefits from panoramic views, as well as a roof terrace with pool deck, restaurant, and gardens. Lush vegetation installed across the urban windows provide the building into vertical gardens, a contemporary interpretation of the garden culture and pavilions of the Jiangsu province. This integration of greenery offers sustainability strategies on ecological, social, and historical levels.

Nanjing Nexus is a building that explores the question how contemporary architecture can absorb, and in fact amplify, historical context and meaning by fusing the qualities of the past with the requirements of a future oriented workspace within the verticality of a super-tall office tower. The convergence of past and present is not merely about formal gestures – it is about creating actual experiences and spaces with specific emotive and experiential qualities. — Ole Scheeren, principal of Buro-OS

Along with its visual characteristics, the concave surfaces optimize the building’s solar performance, reduce structural wind loads, and reflect light in reminiscence of Yangtze River’s waves and ripples. Nanjing Nexus’ simple, economical, and adaptable design can be further translated to multiple scales and functions, such as the building’s adjacent structure, a 100-meter-tall satellite tower which was conceived as an adaptation of the octagonal figure to create a small-scale version of the super-tall tower.