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Galleries // 2013 Spark:Space // Poly International Plaza

Poly International Plaza

Winner - Bronze

Competition: Spark:Space
Designer: Leo Chow - Design Director
Design Type: Architecture
Company / Organization / School: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP
Website: http://www.som.com
Team Members: Keith Boswell, Technical Director Mark Sarkisian, Structural Design Director Larry Chien, Project Manager Angela Wu, Senior Design Architect Brian Mulder, Design Architect Brian Cook, Technical Coordinator Stephanie Chang, Project Coordinator Architecture Team Christopher Talbott, Edward Rendel, Meehae Kwon, Lisa Hedstrom, Chaelyun Lee, Justin Ho, Rikako Wakabayashi Peter Albertson, Tim Watters, Jeffrey Bajamundi Neville Mathias, Senior Structural Engineer Structural Engineering Team Rupa Gurai, Andrew Krebs, Zhaofan Li, Joanna Zhang, Jeffrey Keileh, Christopher Horiuchi, Danny Bentley, Feliciano Racines Tamara Dinsmore, Senior Interior Designer Interior Design Team Frederica Carrara MEP Consultant WSP Flack + Kurtz Landscape Consultant SWA Group Lighting Consultant Francis Krahe & Associates Inc. Green Building Design Consultant Built Ecology Vertical Transportation Edgett Williams Consulting Group

The first building in a proposed new business district located halfway between the Forbidden City and Beijing Capital Airport, the Poly International Plaza will be a highly visible terminus to the new skyline. The design utilizes a long-span structural strategy to open up interior spaces and employs a highly sustainable approach to address the climatic and air quality issues particular to Beijing. ?? A faceted exoskeleton system is part of the primary structure for the building, forming an outer envelope that sleeves over an elongated core and a pair of arc-shaped office spaces. The office spaces are further enclosed within a second, interior, envelope of glazing. The interstitial space between envelopes creates opportunities for social interactions and offers physical and visual connectivity between floors. Mechanically, the semi-climatized interstitial space mediates exterior temperature extremes, reducing the overall building energy consumption by 23% and carbon emissions by 18%. ?? At the narrow ends of the building the interstitial space expands to create two distinct atriums that open outwards to admit daylight and direct views toward central Beijing to the southwest and the airport to the northeast. The atriums provide places of respite and community, protected from Beijing’s cold winters, hot summers, and days of poor exterior air quality. The outer layer of glazing is the result of mapping a surface directly onto the straight structural members, generating a faceted rather than elliptical form. The varying reflections created by these surfaces create legibility of the form in Beijing’s typically dim diffused light.