Best Tall Building Asia Winner: Asia Financial Center & AIIB Headquarters, Beijing
Presenter to be confirmed
Stephan Rewolle
Partner
von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects, Beijing
Li Shan
Planning Director
Beijing Investment Group Co., Beijing
A Harmonious Presence on a Historic Axis
The architectural design of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) Headquarters AIIB Headquarters follows the principles of modesty, respect, and stateliness, and an ambition to be simple, elegant and timeless. Directly facing the Olympic Park to the north, the AIIB Headquarters is located at a very prominent position along the middle axis of Beijing. Neighboring iconic buildings like the Water Cube, China National Stadium and China National Convention Center, AIIB is designed to be a crucial building at the national level. Its 80-meter-tall central hall is framed by a ring of top floors, from which a 360-degree view over Beijing and the West Mountain can be experienced.
The headquarters building is harmoniously integrated into the Olympic Green, aligned with its neighbor buildings. Its height, layout, façades and patterns of shading and pavement show respect to its genius loci. As a multinational bank with members from more than 100 nations, the working space of AIIB aims at distributing and optimizing daylight and views in a most equal way, so that all the employees can have a comfortable working environment. The solution was to arrange the offices on undulating, continuous U-shaped floor plates around nine “lightyards,” to achieve the most even light conditions for all workspaces. The nine-courtyard layout, however, guarantees efficient space usage inside a given plot volume. The nine-courtyard concept was inspired by a classical layout noted in a work on science and technology in ancient china – The Book of Diverse Crafts. In this way, the AIIB building is perfectly embedded into the Olympic Quarter context, while meeting client requirements for maximal land use and efficient functional layout.
