CTBUH 2021 Award winner: Hybrid (Huitong) Tower

The Hybrid (Huitong) Tower in Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China, has won the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) 2021 Awards for Façade Engineering and Innovation.

The CTBUH Awards program honors projects and individuals that have made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, and that achieve sustainability at the highest and broadest level.

The 80m tower, which was completed in 2019, was designed by Jaeger Kahlen Partners Architects.

Senior Associate Bill Peng comments:

“Inhabit’s Shenzhen team provided façade engineering for the project and was involved in full stages of this project from 2017, providing all the design work including work drawings. The subcontractor installed the PMU completely according to the drawings and passed the performance test in one go, and the same was done for the construction and installation.”

Hybrid Tower combines a public car park with premium office space in Nanshan. By combining parking with office space allowed for more buildable space and helps alleviate the growing parking needs of the dense city of Shenzhen, reducing overcrowding.

According to the architects: “The car parking façade is proposed with a perforated metal panel inside, forming a monolithic backdrop. The office tower is transparent, opening up impressive 180-degree views. The Hybrid Tower form is an interaction of the solid parking block and the transparent office building which ensures clear readability of different programmatic volumes that are unified into a single building. Where the monolithic and the transparent volumes intersect, south and north corners of the eastern façade transform into circular elements, highlighting the distinct corner conditions. Broad on the lower levels and tapering upwards conically, the curved edges maximize viewing surface and orientation as well as augment visual height of the tower … The Ipachrome frit print for the office façade is opaque at ceiling level and reduces in density above eye level, creates glare-free work ambience.”

The CTBUH Innovation Award is for the building’s six turbo lifts that allow cars to be loaded or retrieved in under 90 seconds.