CapitaLand’s Raffles City Chongqing scores hat-trick at the 2021 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Awards
Named Overall Category Winner for Best Tall Building Award (300 to 399 metres) and clinched Award of Excellence in the categories of Structural Engineering Award and Fire & Risk Engineering Award
Singapore, 21 May 2021 – Raffles City Chongqing, Singapore’s and CapitaLand’s single largest development in China, has scored a hat-trick at the prestigious 2021 Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) Awards. It was named the Overall Category Winner for Best Tall Building Award (300 to 399 metres); and the winner of the Award of Excellence in two other categories: Structural Engineering Award and Fire & Risk Engineering Award. With three accolades, Raffles City Chongqing is one of the most awarded developments from Asia at the event.
Image credit: Shaofeng Architectural Photography
Mr Vincent Wong, Managing Director, Chongqing, CapitaLand China, said: “An architectural and engineering marvel destined for the books, Raffles City Chongqing is CapitaLand’s largest and most complex Raffles City development to date. The recognition received by Raffles City Chongqing at the 2021 CTBUH Awards is a testament to CapitaLand’s strong track record in real estate development and the quality of our Raffles City brand of integrated developments. Completing this megastructure in 2019 after six years of construction, we had relied on CapitaLand’s over three decades of experience in building integrated developments and more than two decades of local knowledge in China to handle the project’s monumental scale, elaborate design and challenging site conditions. We also counted on the intense collaboration among our supportive team of leading local and international consultants, which deployed state-of-the-art technologies and developed new techniques to deliver the bold and unprecedented architecture of Raffles City Chongqing.”
He added: “CapitaLand is honoured to be recognised by industry experts for the contributions of Raffles City Chongqing towards advancing tall buildings and the urban environment. We share these accolades with our talented in-house project development team as well as the over 50 local and international design, construction and engineering firms that worked closely alongside CapitaLand in the development of Raffles City Chongqing.”
We share these accolades with our talented in-house project development team as well as the over 50 local and international design, construction and engineering firms that worked closely alongside CapitaLand in the development of Raffles City Chongqing.”
The design and engineering of Raffles City Chongqing
A vertically-built riverfront urban district spanning 1.12 million square metres in construction floor area, Raffles City Chongqing brings together a shopping mall, Grade A office space, residential apartments, a serviced residence and a hotel. Designed by acclaimed architect Moshe Safdie, Raffles City Chongqing’s form is inspired by the historic images of great Chinese sailing vessels and pays tribute to Chongqing’s past as a trading centre. The design comprises eight skyscrapers, of which two are 350-metre-high supertall skyscrapers and the other six stand at 250 metres tall. Known as Raffles City Chongqing’s ninth “horizontal skyscraper”, The Crystal is a 300-metre-long enclosed sky bridge nestled above four of the 250-metre-tall skyscrapers and links to two adjacent skyscrapers by cantilevered bridges. The Crystal houses a clubhouse, a Sky Garden with restaurants and bars, as well as the highest glass-bottomed viewing gallery across Western China.
Image credit: Shaofeng Architectural Photography
Image credit: Shaofeng Architectural Photography
Image credit: Shaofeng Architectural Photography
As Raffles City Chongqing’s crowning glory, The Crystal represents an engineering feat. To erect efficiently, the steel structure was first divided into nine segments – four segments that were built in-situ above the four skyscrapers; three middle segments suspended between the four skyscrapers that were prefabricated on ground and hoisted into place by hydraulic strand jacks; and two cantilever segments that were assembled in short sections from the two ends of the rightmost and leftmost towers. Hoisting the three middle steel segments of The Crystal – each weighing up to 1,100 tons – to the height of 250 metres marked a world first.
The support system for The Crystal’s structure uses advanced frictional pendulum bearings and seismic dampers mounted on the towers, which dissipates seismic and wind energy more effectively than the conventional rigidity-driven design. Further, to overcome the high slenderness ratio of the two 350-metre skyscrapers, a hybrid outrigger system with structural fuse was specially developed to ensure the stability of The Crystal sky bridge and the eight skyscrapers in the event of earthquakes. This new system, which represents a breakthrough in the structural engineering of linked high-rise building clusters, received a patent in China in 2014.
In addition to the project’s complexity and sheer scale, the challenges of developing Raffles City Chongqing were compounded by its location at the end of a narrow, densely populated peninsula abutting the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, and with the historic Chaotianmen Square to its north. To mitigate flood risks, Raffles City Chongqing’s reinforced concrete flood barrier is built to 195 metres, the highest flood level recorded locally in 100 years. It was put to the test in August 2020, when Chongqing encountered its worst flood in decades that inundated most, if not all basements of developments along the two rivers. Raffles City Chongqing’s flood barrier had endured; its basement car park was not affected by the major flood and the entire development remained open for business as usual.
To ensure fire safety, Raffles City Chongqing incorporated several fire engineering firsts in China. These included an emergency vehicle access provision for a podium roof, along with a customised discharge and evacuation procedure, as well as the use of a refuge floor for evacuation transfer.
Prior to the accolades at the 2021 CTBUH Awards, Raffles City Chongqing had received an Honourable Distinction for the China Tall Building Innovation Award in 2016. It also enjoys the distinction as Chongqing’s largest development to be accorded the LEED-CS pre-certification (Gold Level) by the United States Green Building Council, which recognises best-in-class building strategies and practices.
In 2018, Raffles City Chongqing was awarded first place for best practices in construction of large projects at the Autodesk AEC Excellence Awards, which celebrates the world's best in architecture, engineering and construction. In 2020, Raffles City Chongqing was named the Global RLI International Shopping Centre by the Retail and Leisure International magazine.
About Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat
The CTBUH is the world’s leading resource for professionals focused on the design and construction of tall buildings and future cities. A not-for-profit organisation based at the Illinois Institute of Technology, CTBUH facilitates the exchange of the latest knowledge available on tall buildings around the world. The CTBUH also developed the international standards for measuring tall building height and is recognised as the arbiter to award such designations as “The World’s Tallest Building.”
The annual CTBUH Awards recognises projects that have made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, as well as achieve sustainability at the highest and broadest level.
Including the three accolades clinched by Raffles City Chongqing, CapitaLand has to date received eight accolades conferred by the CTBUH. In 2015, CapitaGreen, an office development in Singapore, was named the overall category winner in the Best Tall Building Award (Asia and Australasia Region); while d'Leedon, a residential development in Singapore, received the Award of Excellence in the Urban Habitat Award category. In 2014, The Interlace, a residential development in Singapore, topped the Urban Habitat Award as the overall category winner and also nabbed an Award of Excellence for the Best Tall Building Award (Asia and Australasia Region). In 2013, Raffles City Chengdu in China received the Award of Excellence in the Best Tall Building Award (Asia & Australasia Region).
CapitaGreen, Singapore
d'Leedon, Singapore
The Interlace, Singapore
Raffles City Chengdu, China