Terraced mixed-use development planned for Shanghai’s urban city ring

Resembling a stack of green terraces with a glass façade draped over the top like a blanket, “Cloud on Terrace,” a new mixed-use development, has been revealed for Shanghai’s urban city ring. The development will add almost 500,000 sf of office and retail space near a planned residential development, archdaily.com reports.

The building’s design, a retail podium with vegetated terraces that gives way to a deliberately ambiguous form of soft corners and a rippling curtain wall façade, is described by Aedas, the architect for the project, as resembling a cloud sitting just above a hill.

The “hill” in this instance is the retail podium, which has entrances on both ends of the building that face the most highly-trafficked pedestrian junctions and linking to two nearby metro stations. As the building rises, the retail terraces give way to the glass façade.

This façade uses horizontal ribs around the tower as sunshades and high-performance, low-e, low-iron glass to reduce solar gain on the office floors. The naturally ventilated terraces use natural landscaping for cooling and shading benefits.

Gemdale Changshou Road, the development’s official name, is scheduled for completion in 2019.

Rendering courtesy of AsymmetricA