The 600-meter Guangzhou TV tower, which beats Toronto’s CN Tower (553m) as the world’s tallest TV tower, officially opened to tourists on September 29th.Tickets to the tower were priced at 50 yuan, 100 yuan and 150 yuan based on different heights. A top-level ticket will offer an access to the 84th floor (433m) by the high-speed elevator that only takes one minute and a half to finish the ascent. Visitors can get a bird’s-eye view there over the whole city.
Guangzhou TV and Sightseeing Tower (also known as Canton Tower) is a tower currently under construction near Chigang Pagoda, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It was topped-out in 2009 and will be completed in 2010 in order to be fully operational for the 2010 Asian Games.
The Tower is designed by the Dutch architects Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit. “Where most skyscrapers bear ‘male’ features; being introvert, strong, straight, rectangular, and based on repetition, the architects Mark Hemel and Barbara Kuit wanted to create a ‘female’ tower, being complex, transparent, curvy and gracious and sexy. Their aim was to design a free-form tower with a rich and human-like identity that would represent Guangzhou as a dynamic and exciting city.” The result is a tower, very slender and tall, that bears similarities with the figure of a female, the very reason that earned it the nickname: ‘super-model‘.”
The idea of the tower is simple. The form, volume and structure is generated by two ellipses, one at foundation level and the other at a horizontal plane at 450 metres. These two ellipses are rotated relative to another. The tightening caused by the rotation between the two ellipses forms a ‘waist’ and a densification of material. This means that the lattice structure, which at the bottom of the tower is porous and spacious, becomes denser at waist level. The waist itself becomes tight, like a twisted rope; transparency is reduced and views to the outside are limited. Further up the tower the lattice opens again, accentuated here by the tapering of the structural column-tubes.
