Steven Holl Architects has received a GREEN GOOD DESIGN Award for the Horizontal Skyscraper – Vanke Center in Shenzhen, China.
GOOD DESIGN was founded in Chicago in 1950 by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames, to promote and foster a greater public understanding and acceptance for Modern Design. The new GREEN GOOD DESIGN Awards, sponsored by the European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, and the Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design, aim to recognition outstanding individuals, companies, organizations, governments, and institutions—together with their products, services, programs, ideas, and concepts—that have forwarded exceptional thinking and inspired greater progress toward a more healthier and more sustainable universe.
The Horizontal Skyscraper, completed in December 2009, is as long as the Empire State Building
is tall. Suspended on eight cores, as far as 50 meters apart, the building’s structure is a combination of cable-stay bridge technology merged with a high-strength concrete frame. The first structure of its type, it has tension cables carrying a record load of 3280 tons.
The building and the landscape integrate several new sustainable aspects: a microclimate is created by cooling ponds fed by a grey water system; the building has
a green roof with solar panels; it is a tsunami-proof hovering architecture that creates
a porous micro-climate of public open landscape. The Horizontal Skyscraper is one of the first LEED platinum rated buildings in Southern China and recently received a 2010 AIA New York Honor award and a 2010 Good Design is Good Business China Award for
Best Green project.