On May 14, we celebrated the grand opening of the Ningbo Center—now the tallest building in Ningbo and across China’s Zhejiang Province.
SOM Managing Partner Xuan Fu and Principal Inho Rhee joined clients, city officials, and representatives from Ritz-Carlton, Marriott, and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) for the ceremony, which included the presentation of a CTBUH certification recognizing the 409-meter skyscraper as the province’s tallest. The tower and its podium form the 250,000-square-meter Ningbo Center complex, which brings together Grade-A office space, the city’s first Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and a range of retail and leisure offerings—establishing the site as a vibrant social and economic hub for residents, travelers, and businesses.
“The Ningbo Center Tower design is the intersection of high-performance engineering, evocative form-making, and rational programmatic function,” said Fu. “SOM’s interdisciplinary approach delivered a unique, ultra-efficient structural system that complements the tower’s form and minimizes material use.”
The tower’s design was inspired by the lotus flower—a symbol of elegance and purity in classical Chinese poetry. In his keynote remarks, Rhee shared that the scalloped, unfolding facade evokes the organic motion of a lotus blooming upward toward the sun, creating a distinct silhouette visible from all directions in the city.
The tower also anchors a larger SOM-led master plan, which reimagines the surrounding mixed-use plots (A-22, A-23, and A-25) to reflect the rich cultural legacy and geographic identity of Ningbo—a historic coastal city situated at the meeting point of the Yong River, the East China Sea, and Dong Qian Lake.
