CITIC Tower (China Zun)

Beijing didn’t have a building over 500 meters until China Zun topped out. CITIC Tower changed that, rising 528 meters on a tight plot in the heart of the central business district and handing the capital a skyline anchor shaped like an ancient ritual wine vessel, the zun the tower is named for.

Project Scope

The tower carries 108 floors above grade and eight below, with a gross floor area near 437,000 square meters of office and amenity space. Its silhouette is the engineering story: the profile narrows at the waist and flares at the base and crown, a shape that fights the eye but also the wind and seismic loads that come with building this tall in a high-intensity earthquake zone. Kohn Pedersen Fox led the design, with TFP Farrells on the early concept and BIAD as architect of record. Arup engineered the structure around a mega-frame of giant perimeter columns tied to a reinforced concrete core. China Construction Third Engineering Bureau ran the build, which started in mid-2013 and delivered at the end of 2018 at a reported cost near 24 billion yuan, roughly $3.8 billion.

Why It Matters

China Zun was the only building above 500 meters delivered anywhere in the world in 2018, a marker of how much supertall construction had concentrated in China during the decade. For Beijing, it gave the CBD a clear center of gravity and a piece of structural engineering that has to perform in a city where seismic design governs. The flared-base, pinched-waist geometry shows up in supertalls elsewhere now, but doing it at this height, on this soil, set a reference point. It sits alongside other global supertalls Exchange tracks, including Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, as proof of how far tall-building structural systems have pushed.

Project Team & Details