Jiuzhou Bay Tower

The Jiuzhou Bay Tower is a project design and engineered by SOM. The project includes a new waterfront neighborhood to be built in Zhuhai, China’s greater bay area. The design includes a new mixed-use neighborhood with office, residential, and retail buildings with a major emphasis on sustainability technology. There are five modular canopies and cover the port and generate a unique pedestrian experience. The centerpiece of the development is a 318.5 meter tall tower that will include hotel and office spaces. The tower is inspired by the form of a lighthouse fresnel and designed with daylight, comfort, and sustainability as fundamental drivers.

**My Role**

My role in this project began at the design development stage as a member of the core team to design, engineer, and document the landmark tower. My role and responsibilities are primarily focused on the design development of the facade and include parametric modeling of the exterior geometry, geometric optimization for fabrication, and design documentation. I worked with the design team to coordinate facade system constraints, materials, and identify potential solar energy technology integration. The uniqueness of the tower’s design challenged me to develop a highly detailed parametric model using Grasshopper that also served to coordinate the primary structure and interiors.

**Process**

The project includes a supertall skyscraper that reaches a height of 318.5 meters with 65 levels of mixed-use program including office, hotel, and retail. The building’s form is characterized by a finely tuned geometry that is derived from a series of tangential vertical arcs and plan profile designed to optimize the distribution of load forces, maximize floor plate area, and decrease column spacing in response to programmatic and sustainable design requirements. The tower’s design included complex surface geometry that was addressed through a combination of computational modeling and analytical methods. There was a significant effort made to improve constructability while maintaining the overall character of the architecture. The form of the tower tapers in both plan and section with softened corner edges to minimize wind-induced torsional loads. The curtain wall façade included a sawtooth type surface geometry where the vision glass is inclined, looking downward and the spandrel is declined, looking upward to maximize solar exposure to the spandrel and minimize heat gain. A portion of the curtain wall geometry included double-curved surfaces, which were analyzed to identify optimal radii and best approximate the surfaces with cylindrical geometry for cold bending manufacturing.

Sustainable technologies are applied throughout the project but a significant effort was made to integrate non-crystalline thin-film solar cell technology on the spandrel surfaces which include about 740 panels and make up more than 10,000 m2 of surface area with the potential to generate a significant amount of energy. Additionally, the perimeter reinforced-moment frame was designed to support vertical fins clad in approximately 32,700 mega-panels which are shaped to control daylighting and maintain increased solar photovoltaic sun exposure. The fin panels varied in geometry due to the tapering of the overall tower, producing a range of differentiated planar panels ranging in height from 3000mm to 1200mm. These were modeled by extracting construction geometry from the underlying surface driver and propagating localized inputs (vectors, datums, and amplitudes) across each discrete element. Skeletal modeling methods were used to increased computational performance and automate façade geometry features. This modeling method also included visualization tools that display quantities and façade system types, allowing the team to iterate through multiple designs and utilize irradiance simulation tools to assess the production utility rate for the resulting design models. The interactive reciprocity between the building’s form and discrete elements were critical in applying a computational design framework throughout the stages of the project, helping resolve constructability issues.