Designed as an undulating piece of sculpture on the water’s edge, the COHL Business Centre overlooks the Qiangtang River, the main artery of the city of Hangzhou.

The river is a busy conduit for ships bringing goods and people into the port which serves the wider Zheijang Province.

The formal arrangement of the project is of two towers, which rise from active triple height podiums set within a landscaped block. The ground floor accommodates the public life of the development, with cafés, restaurants and shops alongside the reception areas for the Business Centre, spilling out into the public realm.

Our approach has been to bring a conceptual aesthetic to the form of the towers. The bright shipping containers that pass by every day reminded us of stacked minimalist sculptures: such as those by Louise Nevelson, Donald Judd or Carl Andre. We have emulated this by variating the window reveal depths of each bay across three different planes. Each plane is presented in three corresponding tones of glazing, ranging from clear, to light blue, to a deeper blue. The glass was carefully selected to achieve a variety of colours from the outside, but a continuity and evenness when looking out from inside. The positional patterns of these stacked glass boxes are irregular, but with an underlying diagonal movement along the façade. Where the towers face each other the patterns interlock – as if the towers were once nested together but have been pulled apart.