Competition Ningbo Tower

Ningbo, China

Ningbo, located about 200 km south of Shanghai, is historically shaped by Chinese tradition, British colonial rule, and recent engagement with the political West. The urban traces of this history are evident in the juxtaposition of different building typologies.

Our client, the leading privately organized company for educational materials in China and a private school operator, requires a new headquarters. The project involves 10,000 square meters of office space and 25,000 square meters of retail space, to be developed at the intersection of the colonial city edge and contemporary Chinese urban development of the past twenty years.

The corporate culture focuses on traditional values and natural resources. Consequently, we proposed a building with a rational structural system and flexible floor plan organization. The façade is an artificial representation of a stone or rock, reflecting the company’s culture. It is constructed from pigmented reinforced concrete and features box windows inserted at regular intervals.

The energy concept integrates geothermal and waste heat from the shopping center in the three podium levels, as well as from the office floors, combined with component activation. This approach allows for a single-layer concrete skin with minimal weight, simplifying connection points. As a result, the extension of multi-story façade sections beyond the regular façade plane is easily achievable.

Data

Competition

2005

Address

315000 Ningbo,
Provinz Zhejiang
China

Awarding Authority

Privat

View West
Section
View South

FRIZ Service Centers

Dessau

Giving a young company a distinctive identity and connecting corporate identity with the genius loci was the challenge of the FRIZ service and shopping centers.

Three markets in three very different peripheral locations of East German cities, three distinct individualities forming a unique corporate identity, shaped by the architecture and the unconventional, bold "FRIZ" logo.

With minimal material usage and construction weight, the trusses effortlessly achieve large spans thanks to the use of multiple folded and cold-rolled steel sheets. Stabilized with steel cables and left unclad, supported by a few slender steel columns, they stretch over flexible and transparent retail spaces. Despite their multifunctional division into shop-in-shop units, these spaces are experienced as a continuous spatial flow.

Connections to the urban space are established through large-scale glazing and modular aluminum facades, whose surfaces feature a lively internal structure and shifting shadow relief that integrate into the sharp building silhouettes.

No repetition of banal unoriginality, no artificial postmodern camouflage, but rather a minimized and modular construction of compact building forms that translate different service offerings and local contexts into striking architectural designs.

As confident, standalone organizing elements, the FRIZ service centers inscribe themselves into the disparate, fragmented edges of the cities—so successfully that additional projects for the company's expansion and its architectural corporate identity are already in progress.

Detail Wall/Roof Construction

Data

Completion

1994

Address

Zunftstraße 15-17
06847 Dessau-Roßlau Germany

Client

ANH Hausbesitz, Dessau

Detail Connection Pillar-Roof