Guangzhou, China (NCS) - With the foundation laid, piling constructed and the first 30 meters of the outer frame set, the Guangzhou New TV Tower is on its way to becoming the tallest television broadcasting tower in the world. Rising to 610 meters (2,001 feet) including the 156 meter (512 feet) tall mast, the tower will surpass the current tallest, the 563.3 meter (1,848 feet) tall CN tower in Toronto held since 1976, and become Guangzhou’s tallest building.
A 2004 international contest was held for the design of the tower, a 17.9ha (44 acres) park at its base and the master plan for the surrounding 56.6ha (140 acres) which includes an elevated plaza, pagoda-park, retail facilities, offices, television center and hotel. The collaborative effort between Information Based Architecture (IBA) of The Netherlands and Arup, a global firm of designers, engineers, planners and business consultants, won the commission.
''Our aim was to design a free-form tower with a rich and human-like identity, where all views towards the tower would be different from whatever vantage point,” commented Mark Hemel, Information Based Architecture architect and director.
And according to Information Based Architecture's website, more specifically they wanted to create something aligned with the female “human-like identity”. “Where most historical skyscrapers were bearing male characteristics; being angular, simplistic, heavy and based on repetition, we defined our tower to have the identity of a female; smooth, curved, slender, gracious and incorporating diversity of spaces and floor-plan sizes, in short a sexy tower.”
In total, the building will have 48 steel floors with 37 functional floors divided into five “climate zones”, such as tropical, desert, temperate, providing 42,445 square meters of multi-purpose recreational areas. According to Arup, “Spatially, the tower appears as a series of mini-buildings hung within the superstructure, with mega spaces in between. The roofs of the mini-buildings are used as sky gardens, where visitors can feel the weather variations at different heights.” The waist of the tower features a 180 meter long open-air skywalk, and at over 450 meters high, a large open air observation landscape allows uniquely uncompromised views of the city.
Arup is the lead consultant responsible for the structural, civil, geotechnical, wind, seismic and MEP engineering, as well as the lighting designer for the project. They are working together with the concept architect, Information Based Architecture, and the local design institute, Guangzhou Design Institute, on the challenging architectural design.
According to Szdaily web edition, in 2005 a Guangzhou resident complained that the chosen design resembled a building at a Tokyo port, but while the two buildings may look similar in shape, it was determined that the design could not be considered duplicate given the drastic construction detail differences. Ye Ronggui, a doctorate tutor, said the Guangzhou design was a super high-rise building of unique shape while the Tokyo building was less than 110 meters high of regular shape. Each floor differed from another in the Guangzhou design, while all the floors were basically the same in the Tokyo building, he said.
With the main tower reaching 454 meters (1,489.5 feet), the skyscraper will house TV and radio transmission facilities, observatory decks, revolving restaurants, computer gaming, exhibition spaces, conference rooms, shops and 4-D cinemas. As the capitol of Guangdong province in China, the city of Guangzhou will host the 2010 Asian Games, which will be broadcast from the new tower, and anticipates the tower will attract 10,000 visitors daily.
After breaking ground in August 2006 with a special ceremony arranged by the main contractor, Shanghai Construction Group and Guangzhou Construction Group joint venture, the expensive project, estimated at 1,2 billion RMB Yuan (€135 million), is scheduled to complete the main tower late 2008 and be entirely completed including the mast by end of 2009.
Enhancing the robustness of the structure, the inner core is made of a 16m x 18m oval-shaped grade 60 reinforced concrete.
Arup’s design team leader, Tony Choi, said: “ The complex geometry and the slim waist of the tower makes it a very challenging structural design for Arup in the process of striking balance between architectural form, safety and cost. Performance-based approaches have been adopted to achieve breakthrough on the local regulations on planning, fire escape and structural design issues.”
One of the main issues that had to be addressed regarding cost was the client’s desire to have the tightest waist ultimately possible. Information Based Architecture notes that for every meter the waist is reduced, the cost rises exponentially, because more steel is needed to stiffen this relatively weak part of the tower. Including the mast, over 40,000 tons of structural steel will be used for the project.
Additionally, the size of the core was dictated by the need to fit all the required lifts, shafts and emergency staircases and this added to the width of the waist. Ultimately, a circular core was optimized to an oval shape in order to fit it within the tightest waist possible.
Digital rendering of the Guangzhou Tower
The result: a highly functional building with a unique architectural form. The structure’s rotation between lower and top-level floor plans creates the tower’s symbolic twist and cinched waistline. Simple, but not without plenty of complexity.
Designed using parametric associative software, which can generate geometrical and structural models based on a set of variable parameters and link the geometrical data to the analytical and drafting software, the tower is comprised of an outer steel frame and an inner concrete core. Using 35,000 tons of steel, the outer lattice frame consists of 24 inclined, concrete-filled, tubular columns, 46 layers of oval-shape steel ring beams and over 1,100 sloping steel bracing members.
