Jan 2 2006
The ground breaking ceremony for what will be the world’s tallest TV tower has taken place in Guangzhou, South China.
Information Based Architecture (IBA) and Arup worked collaboratively to win the commission for the design of the new TV Tower for the City of Guangzhou, which will be the host city for the 2010 Asian Games. The tower will be one of the tallest buildings in the world - reaching 610m in height and is hoped will attract 10 000 visitors daily. The international competition was held in 2004 for the design of the tower, a 17.9ha park at its base and the masterplan for the surrounding 56.6ha which includes an elevated Plaza, pagoda-park, retail facilities, offices, television centre and hotel.
Arup’s Director, Joop Paul, said: ''This project is extremely exciting for the team. The tower is a fusion between art and engineering design, which will enrich the Guangzhou cityscape and certainly become an iconic structure to equal the world’s finest. It is the result of a truly collaborative global team effort between IBA, who are based in Amsterdam, and Arup, whose team included specialists from Amsterdam, Hong Kong, London and Shenzhen.''
Mark Hemel, IBA architect and director, comments: ''Our aim was to design a free-form tower with a rich and human-like identity, where all views towards the tower would be different from whatever vantage point. The towers free-form shape is basically a simple concept derived from a rotation between the bottom and top-level plans. This produces the tower’s characterizing “twist” and narrowing waist-line.''
The interior of the tower will be subdivided into programmatic zones with various functions including: TV and radio transmission facilities, observatory decks, revolving restaurants, computer gaming, restaurants, exhibition spaces, conference rooms, shops and 4D cinemas. The design further emphasizes the outdoor and physical experience for the visitor. The waist of the tower contains a 180m long open-air skywalk where visitors can experience the towers structure and narrow waist-line from close by. There are outdoor gardens set within the structure, and at the top at +450m, a large open air observation landscape opens up magnificent views over the city. Spatially the tower reads like a series of mini-buildings hung within the super-structure, with ''mega spaces'' in between These mega-spaces in between the mini-buildings are in fact floating gardens each varying in atmosphere; transparent, light and open at the base, and more closed and shaded at the waist of the tower. Arup’s design team leader, Tony Choi, said: “ The complex geometry and the slim waist of the tower makes it a very challenging structural design for Arup in the process of striking balance between architectural form, safety and cost. Performance-based approaches have been adopted to achieve breakthrough on the local regulations on planning, fire escape and structural design issues.”
Preliminary design was passed by the local authorities and expert panel in mid November 2005. The new TV tower is due to be completed at end 2009 and will be opened for tourism in 2010. The broadcasting of the Asian Games 2010 will be from this new TV tower.