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“Diamond Lantern”—Poly International Plaza
Poly International Plaza is located at the west side of highway to Beijing Capital International Airport. Every morning, from the airport, whether you are self-driving or taking buses or subways to downtown Beijing, you can always see the building.
The main body of the plaza was designed using double-layer glass as curtain wall and oblique grid as bracing structure. This kind of oblique crossing structure follows the shape of Chinese origami lanterns, which can hardly be found on other office buildings in the world. And the combination of prism reflection effect gives the whole façade an appearance of “diamond lantern”.
This plaza was designed by SOM, an American company. For the main T1 building, it uses a “tube-in-tube” structure: cross grid concrete filled steel tubular column as outer frame-tube, reinforced concrete column as inner frame-tube. The outer frame-tube is comprised of oblique cross-woven grid (with an approximate angle of 45°) of concrete filled steel tube and perimeter beam, the whole steel dosage of which is over 10,000 tons. The outer and inner frame-tubes are joined with each other every two layers and the floors are suspended alternately; Ashared patio at the complete height of 127m at the main entrance of the lobby gives a shocking visual effect, while presenting an incontinuous plane structure between stories; On the top of the patio, there is six-flight spiral stairs with an overhung span of 10m; Both the construction plane and vertical structure are irregular. The whole building is full of unique architectural interests, yet a big challenge to the design.
The T1 main building of the plaza is 9.76m high, T2 building is 8.4m, T3 building is also 8.4 high. These three buildings all use no-column design, which are north-south all-transparent with capacious space. Additionally, the dragline curtain wall glass for the first floor lobby of T1 building uses jumbo-size double-layer laminated super clear glass panels, while stainless steel costal-type curtail walls for the first floor lobbies of both T2 and T3 buildings use jumbo-size insulated super clear glass panels with excellent energy-saving performance. These jumbo-size glass panels for curtain wall and special glass panels for spiral stairs are the same with those used for Apple retail stores, which are all provided by NorthGlass.
Especially, glass panels used for the three spiral stairs are NorthGlass’s ingenious products.
In the course of construction, in order to get things rolling smoothly, NorthGlass went to and fro the construction site countless times for investigation and basically witnessed the whole process of the project.
On 16th, Sep., 2016, America NCSEA announced in a convention held in Orlando city in Florida that, Beijing Poly International Plaza won “2016 Excellence in Structural Engineering Award” in 2016. Another winner was Seoul Lotte Tower, to which NorthGlass was also one of the glass suppliers.
These glass panels from NorthGlass undoubtedly grace this plaza as a national landmark building.