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.
Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick studio, said:
“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.”
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.
Mat Cash, partner and group leader at Heatherwick studio said:
“Super large-scale developments are being built all over the world to satisfy rapidly urbanising populations. By their very nature they are often overbearing, singular and devoid of character – they do nothing for people they are meant to serve. As a counterpoint, we wanted to infuse our project in Xi’an with the spirit, variety, and texture that happens naturally in cities over time. The district pays homage to the city’s tradition of making and its historic connection to ceramics. It is a place which invites you to reach out and touch it – with glazed lift buttons and door handles to hand-carved timber handrails and seats. We hope it will be a place that feels immediately a part of the city and where visitors to the neighbourhood will want to spend time in the decades to come.”
Xi’an CCBD’s public spaces opened to visitors in December 2024.
–
About Heatherwick studio
Heatherwick studio is a team of over 250 problem solvers dedicated to making the physical world around us better for everyone. Based out of our combined workshop and design studios in London, Shanghai, and California, we create buildings, spaces, objects and infrastructure. We want to see a world where the buildings and places around us are radically more joyful, engaging and human.
The studio’s completed projects include several internationally celebrated buildings, including Little Island in New York City, the award-winning Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, Azabudai Hills district in Tokyo, and Coal Drops Yard in London. The studio is currently working on 30 live projects in ten countries. These include Hainan Performance Art Centre, a major cultural institution in China, mixed-use projects in Shanghai and Seoul, as well as new headquarters for Google in London (in collaboration with BIG).
“Humanise: A Maker’s Guide to Building Our World” by Thomas Heatherwick, the studio’s founder, was published in 2023 by Viking (imprint of Penguin).
The post How to create future heritage. Heatherwick studio’s newest district opens in Xi’an first appeared on Informed Infrastructure.