The Xi’an Central Cultural District, China by WTD GROUP

The Xi’an Central Cultural Business District (CCBD) occupies 138 acres of land with a total GFA of 565,000 square meters, and is planned to include condominiums, ultra-high-rise Grade A offices, a Park Hyatt Hotel and a luxury Vientiane City. The commercial podium in the commercial district features streets and terraces for people to walk and climb, and together with the piazza, office towers, residential towers, hotels, green roofs, and a longitudinal garden – the Tree of Life – the CCBD offers a diversified commercial wanderlust experience.

The CCBD landscape design is inspired by a ginkgo tree planted by the ancient Chinese Emperor Tang Taizong at the ancient Guanyin Temple 1,400 years ago. Ginkgo biloba is the most typical design element in the whole project.

Ginkgo grows out of the tree of life and spreads along different spatial scales such as the city, street, and front door, and the organic growth of the leaves spreads to the whole site, finally constituting the landscape nodes of the commercial body.

Centering on the Tree of Life, the core space of the landscape includes the Miracle Avenue, Mountain View Grand Steps, Entrance Space, Elegant Corridor, Rooftop Garden, Ginkgo Garden, XI’AN Tree and so on.

Among them, XI’AN Tree, as the core building of this project, is designed by the famous British architect Thomas Heatherwick. Located in the center of the square, it rises up from the ground floor and consists of 60 steel-structured giant leaves, making it a 57m-high vertical park. The leaves restore the seven ecological features of steppe, dry desert, dry shrub, temperate broadleaf forest, mountain forest, alpine tundra and temperate grassland along different heights, expressing the horizontal geo-cultural and climatic representations in a vertical dimension. This design not only reflects the cultural heritage of Xi’an, but also shows the perfect combination of modern architecture and natural ecology. It is an urban space that inherits the history and faces the future.

The conceptual design of the landscape is Heatherwick Studio, and the deep detailed design is WTD GROUP.Throughout the process of deepening the design, we worked with Heatherwick Studio which is the world’s best design teams to create a visually striking and vital landscape. The goal of Xi’an CCBD is to create a phenomenal Wanxiang City that combines history, culture, nature and the future, and the realization of this vision will have a significant impact on the commercial and cultural development and urban image of Xi’an and the greater Northwest region.

• Project typology:

Square or plaza

• All landscape architecture offices involved in the design of landscape:

1)Heatherwick Studio (From UK)

2)WTD GROUP(From CN)

• Architecture offices involved in the design:

Heatherwick Studio

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