With its clean lines and elegant hyperbola, Chongqing Gaoke Sun Constellation Mansion, located on the north side of the Xingfu Square, appears to be beaming into the stratosphere. The soft contour etched by sturdy building materials renders it a city architecture par excellence.
The Aedas-designed building—one of the world’s six major architectural firms—has begun to take shape. Project designer and Global Design Principal Ken Wai told Bloomberg Businessweek (Chinese Edition) that the inspiration came from the Northern Lights, and the project is expected to be completed in 2022. The curved shape of the north-south facade is deceivingly simple, when it is in fact wrought from extraordinary technical prowess. Ken Wai exposited the largest single-layer twisting angle in the project volume is 8.8 degrees per floor, far exceeding similar projects.
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”—In Ken Wai’s view, often the simpler the shape, the greater the requirement for details.
Ken Wai graduated from the Bartlett School of Architecture — University College London, and has nearly 30 years of architectural design experience. Simplicity has always been his design philosophy, with which he summarised with what he calls the “One Move Architect,” which entails deploying one approach as a guiding principle in face of all problems.” Ken Wai believes that every design has a crux—rather than muddying the waters from trying to consider all possibilities, a concise solution can be distilled from simply interpreting that crux. “A project is accomplished if the substance and connotations can be understood without the architect’s explanation,” he concludes.
Read the article in Chinese HERE.
