SOHO China, the developer that has become a major patron of cutting-edge architecture, has hired Iroje Architects and Planners to design Chaowai SOHO, a new shopping and office complex in Beijing s central business district.
Chaowai SOHO will sit across the street from SOHO Shang Du [Record, October 2004], an office, retail and residential development designed by LAB Architecture Studio of Australia, which broke ground this fall.
The Chaowai project is considered a new typology of shopping mall, with a fluid, historically minded character that aims to set the project apart from the massive shopping arcades of the region. The retail galleria will be organized as a circular bazaar recalling the courtyard architecture native to northern China. The designers intend to give the area a pedestrian feeling reminiscent of open-air markets, with a central plaza framed by a four-story commercial mall. A 25 story glass tower of offices will stand on one side of the plaza.
Iroje Architect s founder is Korean architect Seung H-Sang, whose work has a uniquely Asian quality and reinterprets historicism in a vocabulary that manages to be both cool and organic
The total size of the development is about 110,000 square meters, with 40,000 square-meters of commercial space. It will be located within Beijing s central business district, a four-square-kilometer area that until recently had mostly utilitarian apartment blocks and state-owned factories. The zone is now slated for redevelopment featuring tall office and apartment buildings, with Rem Koolhaas/OMA s CCTV headquarters as its neighborhood landmark.
Chaowai SOHO will be SOHO s sixth major project. Others include two office and residential complexes in Beijing, Jianwai SOHO [Record, March 2004], SOHO New Town, the Commune by the Great Wall, and the Boao Canal Village in Hainan Island in the South China Sea. SOHO had hired Zaha Hadid to realize a residential apartment scheme in Beijing, but the project was cancelled in late 2004.
Seung H-Sang is also working as master planner for several large-scale urban and campus projects in Korea, Japan, and China. The architect has worked for SOHO before: in 1999, he designed the central clubhouse at the Commune by the Great Wall.
