The British architect Chris Wilkinson has designed and delivered one of the four tallest buildings in China, and the ninth tallest in the world. Not bad for a 65-year-old designer who had never done a tower before. The about 440m Guangzhou International Finance Centre is more than 122m taller than Renzo Piano’s much-heralded Shard, which is now rising slowly above London Bridge station.
|||The British architect Chris Wilkinson has designed and delivered one of the four tallest buildings in China, and the ninth tallest in the world. Not bad for a 65-year-old designer who had never done a tower before. The about 440m Guangzhou International Finance Centre is more than 122m taller than Renzo Piano’s much-heralded Shard, which is now rising slowly above London Bridge station.
What Wilkinson’s practice, Wilkinson Eyre, has done is something rare – it has gone very big in a way that makes it possible to think of searing verticality in terms of an almost chaste elegance of surface and outline. No penile dementia here.
The word “seamless” is grossly overused by architects, and is not necessarily a virtue. But this £280 million (R3.2 billion) tower, whose final internal fit-out will be completed in November, comes close to being seamless in a virtuoso way. Wilkinson and project architect Dominic Bettison have added something architecturally original to the world of skyscrapers, and not just because the Guangzhou tower won the Council on Tall Buildings’ 2011 Asia and Australasia Award.
It is when you start to make comparisons that Wilkinson Eyre’s achievement becomes obvious. Contemporary skyscrapers are usually big, big toys for big, big boys – shiny corporate suits that have mutated into vertical architecture. And the craving for uniquely erect brandmarks is often painfully overwrought. The Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur spring to mind, as does the Shanghai World Financial Centre – think of a vast bottle opener-cum-chisel.
And how about the astonishing stack of glass and steel pagodas otherwise known as the Taipei 101 tower? Even London’s Broadgate tower, which won the CTB’s European award in 2009, looks horribly fidgety and clunky compared to Wilkinson Eyre’s svelte architecture.
Wilkinson and Bettison have made it look pretty effortless. But their entry into the skyscraper big league is a surprise and could not have been predicted a decade ago. At the start of the Noughties, Wilkinson Eyre was regarded as being among the very best of Britain’s hi-tech architects – though hardly an international superstar in the making.
But it was also at that time that two young Chinese trainee architects in the practice – Walter Wang and William Chen – began to politely pester Wilkinson and co-principal Jim Eyre to try for commissions in China. Wilkinson told them he wouldn’t go prospecting for work on spec, but would consider entering specific design competitions. In 2004, Wang and Chen dug out the design competition for the Yue Xiu Group’s International Finance Centre. That was when Wilkinson found they had caught a tiger by the tail.
His practice was given two days to complete and submit the wodge of competition forms. When Wilkinson found himself – with engineering partner Arup – on the 14-strong shortlist, he was told to submit design proposals within two weeks. This must have seemed like architecture crossed with a riotously busy Chinese dim-sum restaurant. In Britain, even general design proposals can take many months to develop.
When Wilkinson Eyre was told it had got the job, it was given just two months to produce fully detailed design drawings – again, a timescale unheard of in Europe or the US. The practice set up a design office in Hong Kong, which is 90 minutes from Guangzhou by train. The tower team swelled to more than 20 and there were technical meetings in China.
“The design presentations were slightly crazy, at least 30 people, all these Chinese professors, smoking, with two mobile phones on the go. My God, it was complex. They wanted great detail and really big models and drawings 3m high. So we had a very fast learning curve. There was lots of teleconferencing with Arup so we could learn how to design a really high tower.”
Wilkinson admits the involvement of Arup – the world’s most legendary civil engineers – may have been his ace card in winning the design competition. But the fascinating thing about this skyscraper is its form remains very much as per Wilkinson’s initial, idealistic vision. – The Independent
Source: http://www.iol.co.za/sky-s-the-limit-for-tower-s-uk-designer-1.1130785
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