Canton Tower | Information Based Architecture

The Canton Tower has opened its doors to the public since Oct. 1st 2010. It had been a long 6 years process of design and building works to finish it in time for the Asian Games that is hosted in Guangzhou in Nov 2010.

The Canton Tower is the world’s tallest TV and Sightseeing tower, and will be Guangzhou’s most important new building. It will represent the 10 million inhabitants counting metropolis as a cool, progressive and exciting city. This tower reaches 600 m in height, bypassing Toronto’s CN tower, and hopes to attract 10,000 visitors daily.

Mark Hemel, IBA architect and director, comments, “ Where most skyscrapers bear ‘male’ features; being introvert, strong, straight, rectangular, and based on repetition, we wanted to create a ‘female’ tower, being complex, transparent, curvy, gracious and sexy. Our aim was to design a free-form tower with a rich and human-like identity that would represent Guangzhou as a dynamic and exciting city.” The result is a tower, very slender and tall, that bears similarities with the figure of a female, the very reason that earned the nickname: ‘super-model‘.”

The form of the tower was generated by two ellipses, one at foundation level and the other at a horizontal plane at 450 meters. These two ellipses are rotated relative to another. The tightening caused by the rotation between the two ellipses forms a ‘waist’ and a densification of material.

Because of the recent improvements in fabrication and computerized analysis techniques, the structure designs can be complex than ever. The structure consists of an open lattice-structure, built up from 1100 nodes and the same amount of connecting ring- and bracing pieces. Basically the tower can be seen as a giant 3 dimensional puzzle of which all 3300 pieces are totally unique. Since the initial winning of the scheme, the design has been developed over several years. Many tests were done to check the safety and strength of the structure.

By:Delia Chang