A new district designed by Heatherwick studio has opened in Xi’an, honouring the Chinese city’s legacy of craftmanship and ceramics.
The Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD) is located south of the city’s historic centre between the ruins of the Temple of Heaven and the prominent Shaanxi TV tower. The district blends a retail podium with walkable streets, terraces and open plazas, offices, apartments, accommodation, green spaces, and a vertical park.
Ceramics are at the heart of the 155,000m² neighbourhood, with crafted tiles cladding the facade, columns and curving beams, a nod to the ancient capital’s famous Terracotta Army. The design team worked closely with local makers to produce more than 100,000 tiles with a unique glaze. Following over 2,000 experiments, including constructing 1:1 mock ups of the columns, the resulting facade brings interest and intricacy to the exterior of the buildings and invites visitors not just to look at but also touch the tiles.
“Here in Xi’an, we were excited to create a commercial district which gave the city an extraordinary new piece of public space. Instead of simply making different buildings, and paving and planting the spaces between them, there was the opportunity to craft an unexpected three-dimensional urban landscape on many levels, where citizens of the city can promenade and meet each other.
Pursuing our interest in people’s human scale experience of places, we also had the chance to integrate many special constructional details, to help make the project as engaging as possible for people to walk around.
The goal of the whole project was to find a joyful and contemporary way to respond to the history of Xi’an, and bring people together.”
Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick studio
The outdoor streets of the district converge at the central plaza where the Xi’an Tree, a vertical park, creates a natural gathering point. Visitors can ascend its 56 elevated ‘petals’, or terraces where a sequence of cascading gardens follows the biomes of the ancient Silk Route from the alpine tundra to the dry steppe. Standing over 57 meters high from the basement level the Tree offers views across the development with its varying levels of roofs, terraces and streets, as well as the city beyond.
The district has been designed to offer visual complexity from three distances. At a city-scale, it appears as a new neighbourhood of the city with a distinctive skyline inspired by the roofs of the Chinese temples of Xi’an. At a street distance, the varying levels created by the interlocking frames and landscape terraces provide different vantage points of the central plaza as well as the city around it. Finally, at door-level, the design offers a sensory experience in its use of materials and nature, such as ceramic planters and soft-edged stones in the paving patterns.
The central plaza has paving stones arranged like giant ginkgo leaves referencing Xi’an’s sacred 1400-year-old ginkgo tree that grows in the courtyard of the Guanyin Temple and symbolises longevity, endurance, hope, and peace.
Xi’an CCBD’s public spaces opened to visitors in December 2024.
Xi’an Centre Culture Business District
Location: Xi’an, China
Client: China Resources Land (CR Land)
Completion Date: December 2024
Size: 155,000m²
Design Lead: Hetherwick Studio
Design Director: Thomas Heatherwick
Group Leader: Mat Cash
Project Leaders: Luis Sacristán Murga, Simon Winters, Angel Tenorio
Project Managers: Consuelo Manna, Jimmy Hung
Technical Design Leaders: Nick Ling, Maura Ambrosiano
Collaborators:
10 Design (retail planning)
Goettsch Partners (towers A&B Architecture)
Lacime (towers C&D Architecture)
Andre Fu Studio (Hotel Interior Designer)
Territory Studio (Tree Projection & AV Design)
Consultants:
Arup (facade engineering)
RBS (structural engineering)
WSP (MEP engineering)
KTP (Tree structural engineering)
CFT (Tree façade engineering)
WTD (Executive Landscape Architect)
Speirs+Major (Specialist lighting)
MIR (visualisation)
Devisual (visualisation)
Slashcube (visualisation)
Robotics Plus (Tree 3D Design Coordination)
Local Design Institutes
JZFZ (overall LDI)
KTF (façade LDI)
Sky Design (interior LDI)
Green (landscape LDI)
HDA (lighting LDI)
Ceramic manufacturers: HEDE (north podium), TOB (south podium), Yi Design (lift buttons)
Photography: Qingyan Zhu (unless otherwise captioned)
Plan and Section Images: Heatherwick Studio
