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The architectural firm behind an innovative new tower complex featuring a striking “exposed hexagrid exoskeleton” wants to counter the “numbing sameness” of many new urban districts.
One of the company’s latest projects, the Sany IROOTECH Headquarters in the Chinese city of Guangzhou, has just been named “Best Tall Building Worldwide” at this year’s Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) Awards.
The tower complex was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the Chicago-based architectural firm behind the current world’s tallest building—the Burj Khalifa.
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The Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, which consists of two towers, standing 204 meters high (670 feet) and 186 meters (610 feet) high, was revealed as the winner of the title at a ceremony held on Wednesday by the CVU, an international body on tall buildings promoting sustainable urban design and innovation, which has been held since 2002.
The most innovative element of the complex is the “exposed hexagrid exoskeleton and its connections,” the project’s lead designer Brian Lee, consulting partner at SOM, told Newsweek.
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Lee explained that while external structural frames are used in many tall buildings, “Sany IROOTECH advances that approach with five-story modules of mega columns and suspended floors, combining strength with the ability to accommodate movement under wind and seismic forces.”
Architect Javier Quintana de Uña, the chief executive officer of the CVU, told Newsweek that the project “achieves something rare for a tower of this size: a human scale. It is a total work of art, technology, and design.”
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The Sany IROOTECH Headquarters was completed in December 2024, falling within the eligibility window of this year’s awards, which vary from the “Urban Habitat Award” to the “Innovation Award” and more. The projects nominated for this year’s awards were required to be completed between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2025, a spokesperson for the CVU told Newsweek.
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The latest award comes amid growing concerns over accelerating urbanization worldwide in recent decades, with nearly 70 percent of the global population forecast to live in cities by 2050, as noted in a June 2026 study in Geography and Sustainability.
Around 4.5 billion people live in cities today, and that figure is expected to grow by nearly 50 percent by 2050, the United Nations reported in October 2021.
According to the UN, the global population reached nearly 8.2 billion in mid-2024 and is projected to grow by another 2 billion over the next 60 years, peaking at about 10.3 billion by the mid-2080s.
A Lifted ‘Cloud’ Podium
The headquarters of IROOTECH, a cloud technology firm from the Sany Group, a construction equipment manufacturing company, is set in the heart of Guangzhou’s Pazhou business district.
Lee said the project is “efficient, rational, and deliberate in its design strategies.”
Among its unique features is the elevated podium at the base of the complex, which connects the two buildings while creating a public garden space below.
Lee noted: “The towers rise above a ground plane dedicated to the public, echoing the company’s motto, ‘roots anchor while the tree rises.’ The lifted podium of amenities was often called the ‘cloud,’ connecting the architecture to the Internet of Things [IoT] businesses occupying the flexible tower floors.”
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Visitors can access a pedestrian bridge from an adjacent park or outdoor stairways that lead to the podium, where they can enjoy three levels of dining, retail, exhibition space, and extensive garden overlooks with views of the park and the Pearl River beyond it.
The towers feature “a sky garden” as well as tree-planted terraces at every fifth-floor level that shade the façade. The project was designed to meet China Green Building Label Three-Star and LEED Gold standards.
Quintana de Uña said the complex “challenges the traditional, monolithic idea of the corporate tower,” noting that “too often, a headquarters is a sealed object that meets the street with a lobby and a plaza nobody uses.”
The lifted podium gives “the ground back to the public as gardens and open space, and that public life continues upward through the levels above,” Quintana de Uña said, noting that the “private and public space meet naturally, from the street up.”
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A ‘Remarkable’ Structure Made to Withstand Earthquakes
Quintana de Uña added that the structure of the complex is “just as remarkable,” highlighting its “exposed hexagrid.”
Made of concrete-filled steel tube columns that wrap both towers, the hexagrid works like an exoskeleton, with four of every five floors hung from the frame to create column-free, daylit floors. This design allowed the flexibility for office floors to be adapted to residential uses during construction.
With Guangzhou being set in a region prone to seismic activity and strong winds, the building’s diagrid system is designed to provide an "exceptional degree of stiffness and strength for a building of this height,” while unique "friction nodes” allow the two towers to dissipate energy during seismic events, SOM said.
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Lee explained that “the friction connections dissipate earthquake energy through controlled sliding, reducing the potential for structural damage. The challenge was to integrate this system into an exposed frame that defines the building’s architecture while making it more resilient.”
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Inside, visitors are met by two lobbies enclosed in laminated "self-supporting glass.” Materials familiar to Sany’s daily business were transformed, refined, and incorporated into the building. Lee noted: “Rock and cement became bespoke terrazzo walls, cast aluminum took on the appearance of molten stone, and silica and sand became highly transparent, self-supporting structural glass.”
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The Future of Tall Building Design
Sustainability is increasingly at the forefront of tall building design, especially with cities responsible for around 75 percent of the world’s energy consumption and over 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, the UN reported in October 2021.
Lee says SOM believes that all of their designs must address the basics of high performance, including optimized structural and building systems, low embodied and operational carbon, and resiliency.
The firm also believes that nature can be “reintroduced and amplified in a meaningful way to counter the numbing sameness of many new urban districts and buildings for a healthier balance of experiences,” Lee said.
The designer also says that good tall building design puts equal emphasis on “how to create people-oriented public spaces and uses at ground level that are connected and gracious to the city context.”
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Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Marc Vargas, Gray R. Thomas
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