Otemachi One is a joint development by Mitsui & Co. and Mitsui Fudosan on a site that had held three office buildings, among them Mitsui & Co.’s former headquarters. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the design architect, made each of its two towers answer its surroundings. The shorter one, Mitsui & Co.’s new headquarters, draws on … Read more
Mandarin Oriental’s first Beijing hotel never opened. It was a 241-room hotel in the TVCC building beside the new CCTV headquarters, on track to open in 2009, when fire destroyed the building on 9 February, during the Lantern Festival. The brand’s Beijing debut came ten years later and on a different scale. Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing, … Read more
Jiangbeizui is the financial district Chongqing built on the north bank of the Jialing, where the river flows into the Yangtze, and Regent Chongqing opened there in November 2017. Its owner, the Chongqing developer Casin Group, and Regent presented it as the city’s first “urban resort”, a label that in this case covers three restaurants, … Read more
Chongqing IFS, the towers and mall that Wharf developed with China Overseas Land in the new business district of Jiangbeizui, on the north bank of the Jialing, opened in September 2017, and its hotel came first, on the 8th. Niccolo Chongqing fills floors 52 to 62 of Tower 1, about 300 metres high, and was … Read more
Four Seasons opened its fourth hotel in China in October 2010 on about nine acres of bamboo, lily ponds and lagoons inside the West Lake Scenic Area, beside a UNESCO World Heritage site, the lake itself. The site is that of the Jin Sha Gang cultural village, from which, the company says, the hotel draws … Read more
People lived in this valley west of West Lake in the Tang dynasty, and the place was already called Fayun. Its houses were the homes of families who tended the tea on the slopes around them. When Aman opened Amanfayun in January 2010, its second resort in China, it put its rooms into those houses, … Read more
Before Zaha Hadid Architects were given this site in 2012, someone had already started building on it. The foundations of a condominium tower were in the ground at City of Dreams, Melco’s resort in Cotai, and the tower had never been finished. The architects kept them, took the rectangle of the old footprint and extruded … Read more
The Chow Tai Fook Finance Centre stands 530 metres over Zhujiang New Town, the planned business district on the Pearl River in Tianhe, so the view from the hotel is of the new city. New World Development, the Cheng family’s property company, built it to a design by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which won the competition … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Guangzhou occupies the top third of Guangzhou International Finance Center, a tower of 103 storeys and 440 metres that WilkinsonEyre won in a 2004 competition and that was built for Yuexiu Property Group between 2005 and 2010. The architects gave it a triangular plan and a diagrid structure, which they describe as … Read more
Rosewood Bangkok rises 30 storeys on Ploenchit Road, and its silhouette answers a planning guideline as much as a gesture. Kohn Pedersen Fox, the New York architects, explain that the sloping form responds to Bangkok’s setback guidelines: as the tower climbs it steps back, which creates terraces and smaller floor plates. The same incline carries … Read more