Photo © Lv Hengzhong
When Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) won the competition to design the first major building for a business district in the southeastern Chinese city of Nanchang, the architects in the firm’s Chicago office felt a dual set of responsibilities: As a potential new landmark, the office and hotel tower had to make a statement, but the building—and, by extension, the new district—shouldn’t steamroll older parts of the city.
“We wanted to try to make visual, physical, and mental connections with the old city, and to unify that new district,” says SOM’s Mark Nagis, AIA, senior design architect on the Jiangxi Nanchang Greenland Zifeng Tower.