The concept of low carbon, eco-friendly and sustainable development is widely adopted by a growing number of modern commercial office projects. They strive to adopt green building standards throughout the entire process of design, procurement, construction and operation management. When it comes to the optimization of building facades, terracotta facades are widely used in new commercial office building due to its environmental friendliness and the scientific design of terracotta rainscreen wall systems.

Project: Yizaijin City Commercial Office

LOPO Terracotta Panels: T18mm series, T33mm series

The project is located at the intersection of Junzhu Road and Shangyu Road, Mawei District, Fuzhou City, Fujian Province, China. It will serve as an integrated modern service industry cluster, bringing together office buildings, financial service, cultural and leisure facilities. With an overall floorage of 57235.6 square meters, the total investment is around 50 million US dollars, among which, the office building area is 21,547.2 square meters, and the commercial building area is 13,586.6 square meters. It consists of a 23-story tower surrounded by 4 to 5-story skirt buildings. The 1st to 4th floor of the skirt buildings and the 1st to 5th floor of the main tower serve as a commercial complex, the 6th to 22nd floors are office buildings, and the 23rd floor is the club house. The tower is 99.7 meters in height while the commercial building’s height is 20.8 meters.

This is the first time that Ching Luh Group ventured into a new area of business---commercial real estate development, with a vision to better support Fuzhou Free Trade Zone’s development. It aims at building a complex with malls and office buildings with distinct Taiwanese style and meeting the requirements of low-carbon construction. The project applies green building design concept and is the first green building in the Mawei District.

The name of the project originated from the historical site of the “Yizaijin city” in Tainan, Taiwan, which was a coastal fortification for Taiwanese to defend against the invasions 150 years ago. It was designed and built by French engineers. Many of the building materials were taken from the abandoned red brick walls locally. Located on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, Mawei District in Fuzhou and Taiwan shares great similarities, consanguineously, historically and culturally. The two areas both have fought the foreign enemies. Therefore, with regard to the project’s architectural facade design, the theme concept of “Yizaijin city” is used in combination with historical elements of Mawei. With the help of the modern terracotta curtain wall materials, it depicts the classical elements of history by using dark red and light yellow terracotta panels mimicking the antique-style red bricks and French wall columns.

The exterior wall of the office building above the 6th floor adopts vertical hanging terracotta panel installation system. The neat vertical lines are formed by the terracotta cladding panels and the glass curtain wall while the top floor eaves has a unique arrow tail design. The commercial area below the 5th floor uses a horizontally mounted terracotta panel installation system with special French-style wall columns at the eaves and window edges. The overall facade of the project vividly illustrates the historical architectural style of “Yizaijin city”.