Horizontal China Skyscraper

Written by Arnold Guyman Monday, 17 January 2011 21:00

NEW YORK, NY.- The Horizontal Skyscraper is an innovative example of the large-scale, hybrid use building, which challenges the usual developer typologies. The building hovers above a tropical landscape, freeing it for public use and for a unique scheme of ecosystem restoration. People in the surrounding community have already begun inhabiting this new type of public space for leisure. By lifting the building off the ground, the project is both a building and a landscape, a delicate intertwining of sophisticated engineering and the natural environment. The Horizontal Skyscraper, completed in December 2009, is as long as the Empire State Building is tall.  Suspended on eight cores, as far as 50 meters apart, the building’s structure is a combination of cable-stay bridge technology merged with a high-strength concrete frame.  It is the first structure of its type, it has tension cables carrying a record load of 3280 tons.

Steven Holl Architects has been awarded two 2010 Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) New York Chapter for the Horizontal Skyscraper in Shenzhen, China and the Knut Hamsun Center in Hamarøy, Norway.

The building and the landscape integrate several new sustainable aspects: a microclimate is created by cooling ponds fed by a grey water system; the building has a green roof with solar panels; it is a tsunami-proof hovering architecture that creates a porous micro-climate of public open landscape. The Horizontal Skyscraper is one of the first LEED platinum rated buildings in Southern China and recently received a 2010 Good Design is Good Business China Award for Best Green project.

The project employs some of the most forward-thinking sustainable design strategies. It utilizes greywater recycling, rain water harvesting, green roofs, dynamically controlled operable louvers, and high-performing glass. 1400 square meter of photovoltaic panels installed on the roof of the building provide 12.5 percent of the total electric energy demand.

“This project skips along from mound to mound and manipulates the landscape – it builds it up and shapes it into a powerful form above the land with inventive manipulation. The building is shading the landscape and letting it breath – integrated sustainability. A reinvented building type with the building floating over the landscape – dancing on the landscape.” – AIA Jury