A new district designed by London-based Heatherwick Studio has opened in Xi’an.
Honoring the Chinese city’s legacy of craftmanship and ceramics, the Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD) blends a retail podium with walkable streets, terraces and open plazas, offices, apartments, accommodation, green spaces, and a vertical park.
A view from above at Xi’an Tree
The outdoor streets of the district converge at a 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 more than 187 feet above the basement level, the Tree offers views across the development and the city with its varying levels of roofs, terraces, and streets.
“Here in Xi’an, we were excited to create a commercial district, which gave the city an extraordinary new piece of public space,” says Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick studio. “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.”
Xi’an CCBD’s dynamic design
At a city-scale, the district appears as a new neighborhood with a distinctive skyline inspired by the roofs of the Chinese temples of Xi’an. At a street distance, varying levels, created by interlocking frames and landscape terraces, provide different vantage points of the central plaza as well as the surrounding 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.
“Super large-scale developments are being built all over the world to satisfy rapidly urbanizing populations. By their very nature, they are often overbearing, singular, and devoid of character—they do nothing for people they are meant to serve,” says Mat Cash, partner and group leader at Heatherwick Studio. “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.”
Ceramics are at the heart of the neighborhood, with crafted tiles cladding the façade, columns, and curving beams in 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, “paying homage to the city’s tradition of making and its historic connection to ceramics,” Cash adds. “It is a place that 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 neighborhood will want to spend time in the decades to come.”
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