Fronting a major traffic circle in Zhujiang New Town, the Agile Corporation Headquarters Tower stands at a significant gateway to Guangzhou’s emerging city center. The design of the elliptical high-rise responds to the site’s subtropical climate, making its environmental performance visible on the building’s skin.

The high-performance curtain wall system is layered with horizontal metal fins, fritted glass, and corrugated metal spandrel panels, which create the facade’s unique appearance from different angles. The spandrel panels give the tower its luminous quality, reflecting the shifting sunlight throughout the day.

Factoring in the building’s location, volume, orientation, and adjacent buildings, computer modeling was used to analyze the potential heat gain on the building’s surface during Guangzhou’s hot and humid six-month-long summer season. The resultant solar radiation map was translated into an optimized array of horizontal sunscreen fins. As their density corresponds to the solar load, the pattern formed by the arrangement of the fins mirrors how the sun moves across the building. This design solution balances the solar gain of the building in the round, stabilizing the cooling needs and reducing the energy consumption of the tower as a whole.