1. Project Intro

The headquarter of Southern Media Group is located in Guangzhou, China. The base is made up of two pieces of land, with the city road crossing in the middle. This project is 2.3M square feet. The main programs are the office, hotel, apartment, and retail.

2. Role 

I led a team of three architects who just graduated from Architecture School, we won the design of this project in an international competition by beating 36 architecture companies. In the following works, I led three team members with different disciplines as construction, structure, and MEP engineer, readjusted the plan, and selected the appropriate MEP system according to management and configuration, within the budget, with consultancy and the planning department of our client. During the DD and CD phase, Because of the reservation of corresponding solid conditions, we divide the basement into two hight elevation portions, by doing so, we easily met the requirements of the local regulation in charge that the basement and city public underground space shall be connected. My anticipation for this project reduced the influence of change in the late period. 

3. Design Idea

The key to the design of the entire project is to create value for customers through the architectural design, I did it in the following three ways. First, to promote the enterprise's image. Creating a strong sense of the center and landmark by the semi-enclosed city squares with four towers surrounding them. Second, to design a variety of architectural forms, for meeting future market changes. Two of those four high-rise office buildings are designed to be a small proportion of offices and apartments for sale, allowing customers to recover funds in a short time. The other two buildings are designed as a corporate headquarters and hotel, the property belongs to Party A. In addition, we set up a business park with alone-stand buildings as main houses type in the quiet west area. Those house types are directed toward medium-sized enterprises. They can be rented or sold, to effectively adapt to various uncertain factors of the real estate market in China. Third, to emphasize experiential business, for resisting the concussion of E-commerce. Commercial facilities are divided into two forms, one is a centralized MALL and the other is a commercial pedestrian street, these two areas are connected by a footbridge. This square is the center of commercial facilities, I designed a lotus-shaped building with a cultural atmosphere in the center, as a flagship store like apple store, to bring people shopping experiences of pleasure and reunion with family.

4. Technical Essential

The technical difficulty of this project is how to do the novel design and superior quality construction work with limited cost. These tower buildings are designed with curved surfaces, just like some giant ships moving forward in the sea with riding the winds and waves. Those curved surfaces are achieved with KEEL, not with curved glass. That guaranteed the results and saved the cost. The tower buildings in the business park formed a rich space with disordered floor slabs as a rest platform, it has a very nice energy-saving effect. Additionally, this area is at the seaside which is located on soft soil. The depth of the foundation pit is strictly limited. So, we used a non-beam structure and nature draft smoke evacuation system in the basement to effectively reduce the height of the basement and avoid the troubles caused by the deep foundation pit.