HENN wins the competition for an office and shopping complex in Xi’an, a city of four million inhabitants in the heart of China. The design envisages five buildings of differing heights, rotated at an angle of 45 degrees to the northtosouth axis. This reduces the wind loads from the predominantly easterly winds. It additionally enables an optimal exploitation of daylighting on all four sides of the buildings, whereby the staggering of the heights is a further design mechanism that likewise allows sufficient sunlight to enter all the interior parts of the building. At the lower levels the buildings are interconnected by means of open and closed circulation routes, creating a diversity of spatial experiences.
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