the nanjing international youth culture centre is a zaha hadid-designed complex nearing completion in china’s eastern jiangsu province. boasting two large skyscrapers, the architecture is intended to serve as a transition from the verticality of the city’s central business district to the horizontal topography of the adjacent river. set to complete later in 2016, the flagship scheme includes a hotel, a conference center, office and administrative areas, and basement parking.with on-site construction work wrapping up, photographer khoo guo jie visited the site to document the project. the new images illustrate the scale of zaha hadid’s design, which occupies an area of 5.2 hectares. containing a five-star hotel and various offices, the taller of the two towers is 314 meters tall (1,030 feet), while the shorter high-rise, housing a hotel for the conference center on the plaza, climbs to a height of 255 meters (837 feet).
below, the two towers share a five-storey mixed-use podium. ‘at the interface between tower and podium, the glass facade gradually transforms into a grid of rhomboid fibre-concrete panels, giving the large surfaces of podium and conference center a solid and sculptural appearance; underlining the dynamic character of the form and providing daylight to the building’s interior,’ explain the architects.internally, the 2,100-seat conference hall is equipped with a multi-purpose proscenium stage for cultural and theatrical events, while a 500-seat concert venue is optimized for acoustic orchestral performances. earlier in 2016, designboom featured the project’s interiors, which were developed in collaboration with GD-lighting design.
competition team: garin o’aivazian, jalal el-ali, kyla farrell, maria tsironi, matthew richardson, melike altinisik, meng chan tang, mirco becker, mostafa el sayed, paolo gamba, saman saffarian, shajay bhooshan, shao-wei huang, shyamala duraisingam, spyridon kaprinis, suryansh chandra, yevgeniya pozigun，project team: alexandros kallegias, ashwin shah, carlos piles puig, chao wei, charbel chagoury, david doody, duarte reino, ed gaskin, emma chen, ermis chalvatzis, eugene leung, frenji koshy, george frenji, ho-ping hsia, hongdi li, igor pantic, jamie mann, john randle, juan liu, julia mcleod, katharina hieger, konstantinos mouratidis, leonid krykhtin, mattia gambardella, michael grau, michael sims, mostafa el sayed, nassim eshaghi, natassa lianou, niqui berkowski, patryk ruszkowski, sebastian andia, shajay bhooshan, soomeen hahm, spyridon kaprinis, yuchen zhang, yue shi, yun zhang.
