Photo © Tim Griffith
For what will be the eighth-tallest building in the world when finished in Tianjin, China, later this year, SOM didn’t want to do a paint-by-the-numbers glass facade. Which is good, because the designers couldn’t have even if they wanted to—the Tianjin CTF Finance Centre’s convex and concave surfaces, along with its tapered shape, meant to help shed the wind loads bearing on such a tall building (it will eventually reach over 1,700 feet), demanded an original solution.