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BusinessWeek /Architectural Record Awards Winner
Poly International Center in Guangzhou, China, by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is a Class-A office park on the Pearl River Delta. The firm had already designed a successful building for the Poly Real Estate Group in Beijing, and the client’s “expectations were fairly high” for the new project, according to SOM design partner Brian Lee, FAIA. “They wanted a piece of architecture with an identity, but it also had to be a performer.”
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Lee’s team responded to the challenge with a pair of 30-story offset-core towers. A three-story open veranda doubles as a refuge floor midway up the tower, and reduces live loads by allowing wind to pass through the tower. The lattice structure attached to the buildings’ southern facade takes most of the lateral loads and, as an added benefit, reduces solar gain by about half (no small consideration in Guangzhou, where temperatures peak above 100 degrees Fahrenheit). The efficient frame conserved steel by around 15 percent, lowering the cost of construction.
The towers’ narrow aspect ratio allows them to be largely daylit, and each floor has a small, dedicated engineering room, allowing tenants to control their own air-conditioning. Both strategies reduce utility costs. Elevators and restrooms are confined to the glass-clad offset core, and the uninterrupted, column-free floor plates give tenants maximum flexibility. The towers and several low-rise buildings enclose a green court designed by landscape architects SWA. Vegetation covers more area than the buildings’ footprints.
One of the towers has already been sold as office condos; Poly International has retained the other as lease space. Lee notes that the real estate group’s “lease rates are something like 20 percent higher than in similar developments in the area. From all indications, they’re very happy.”
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