XI’AN, CHINA -- A new district designed by Heatherwick studio has opened in Xi’an, China -- honoring the city’s legacy of craftmanship and ceramics. The Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD) is located south of the city’s historic center between the ruins of the Temple of Heaven and the prominent Shaanxi TV tower. The district blends a retail podium with walkable streets, terraces and open plazas, offices, apartments, accommodations, green spaces and a vertical park.
Ceramics are at the heart of the more than 1.6 million-square-foot neighborhood, with crafted tiles cladding the facade, columns and curving beams -- a nod to the ancient capital’s famous Terracotta Army. The design team worked closely with local makers to produce more than 100,000 tiles with a unique glaze. Following over 2,000 experiments, including constructing 1:1 mock-ups of the columns, the resulting facade brings interest and intricacy to the exterior of the buildings and invites visitors not just to look at, but also touch the tiles.
“Here in Xi’an, we were excited to create a commercial district which gave the city an extraordinary new piece of public space,” said Thomas Heatherwick, founder and design director of Heatherwick studio. “Instead of simply making different buildings, and paving and planting the spaces between them, there was the opportunity to craft an unexpected three-dimensional urban landscape on many levels, where citizens of the city can promenade and meet each other.”
Pursuing our interest in people’s human-scale experience of places, we also had the chance to integrate many special constructional details to help make the project as engaging as possible for people to walk around. The goal of the whole project was to find a joyful and contemporary way to respond to the history of Xi’an, and bring people together.”
The outdoor streets of the district converge at the central plaza where the Xi'an Tree, a vertical park, creates a natural gathering point. Visitors can ascend its 56 elevated “petals” or terraces where a sequence of cascading gardens follows the biomes of the ancient Silk Route from the alpine tundra to the dry steppe. Standing nearly 190 feet high -- from the basement level the Tree -- offers views across the development with its varying levels of roofs, terraces and streets, as well as the city beyond.
The district has been designed to offer visual complexity from three distances. At a city-scale, it appears as a new neighborhood of the city with a distinctive skyline inspired by the roofs of the Chinese temples of Xi’an. At a street distance, the varying levels created by the interlocking frames and landscape terraces provide different vantage points of the central plaza, as well as the city around it. Finally, at door-level, the design offers a sensory experience in its use of materials and nature, such as ceramic planters and soft-edged stones in the paving patterns.
“Super large-scale developments are being built all over the world to satisfy rapidly urbanising populations,” said Mat Cash, partner and group leader at Heatherwick studio. “By their very nature, they are often overbearing, singular and devoid of character. They do nothing for people they are meant to serve. As a counterpoint, we wanted to infuse our project in Xi’an with the spirit, variety and texture that happens naturally in cities over time. The district pays homage to the city’s tradition of making and its historic connection to ceramics. It is a place which invites you to reach out and touch it – with glazed lift buttons and door handles to hand-carved timber handrails and seats. We hope it will be a place that feels immediately a part of the city and where visitors to the neighbourhood will want to spend time in the decades to come.”
Xi’an CCBD’s public spaces opened to visitors in December 2024.
