Trade Journals for the Concrete Industry

The Changsha Meixi Lake International Culture and Art Centre is the number one landmark of China’s Hunan Province. For this spectacular project, Zaha Hadid Architects acted as conceptual designers. The project has been materialized by the Beijing Architectural Design Institute; the Beijing Urban Construction Group is acting as general contractor responsible for overall project construction. The entire construction area amounts to 126,000 m² with a total investment of almost 2 billion yuan (over € 250 million). The architectural appearance of this project forms a continuation of the "Zaha curve" with its novel and unique appearance, creating a noble and elegant "hibiscus flower" shape, a truly challenging demand on execution in terms of its structural make-up. As for engineering, it was decided to implement a steel frame reinforced concrete shear wall structure. This peripheral steel structure has a unique shape composed of 22,000 tonnes of constantly bending and twisting steel components. The exterior curtain wall architecture amounts to about 100,000 m², consisting of 74,000 arbitrarily curved surface glass fibre reinforced concrete (GRC) panels.