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A Zaha Hadid Architects-designed office tower has opened in southwest Beijing, and its signature element is a spiralling 194-metre-tall atrium, making it the tallest in the world. Leeza SOHO tower introduces a landmark building to the new Fengtai business district, a burgeoning financial and transport hub lying between Beijing's city centre and the recently completed Beijing Daxing International Airport, which features a radial terminal design also conceived by Zaha Hadid Architects.
The 45-storey office tower contains 172,800 square metres of space. Located on Lize Road next to the business district's rail station—and at the intersection of five new subway lines currently under construction—the site is diagonally dissected by a subway tunnel.
The subterranean conditions inform the architectural expression above, which sees the tower split into two halves and enclosed by a single glazed envelope. The twisting atrium spawned by this configuration extends the full height of the building, rotating skyward as the upper floors realign with Lize Road to the north.
Skybridges on the 13th, 24th, 35th and 45th levels connect the two halves and provide vertigo-inducing views of the space below and the city beyond. Double-insulated, unitized glass curtain wall cladding is stepped to create a textured facade while providing ventilating registers that draw outside air through operable voids, permitting efficient environmental control on every floor.
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