Phoenix Center designed by the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD) is wrapped in latticed glass and steel skin to enunciate the “Mobius Strip” shape on which its design is based. BIAD completed the Phoenix International Media Center in 2012 in Beijing, China. Uniting two separate buildings that serve as office and broadcasting units for Hong Kong media company under a single roof, an immersive diagonal shell construction is formed by applying the Möbius Strip in the third dimension.
The structural system does not only stand for the engineering genius but also improves environmentally beneficial concepts by integrating water collection that naturally falls through these steel channels into the underground tanks for later use of landscaping elements within the 1.8-hectare site area of the edifice. The façade belonging to this 55-meter-tall structure has a soft topography to protect from severe wind pressures in winter. Although this shape evolved from the concept development phases, bringing it to life required some computational thinking and complicated parametric codes.
