Project Description
Formerly mid-tier Asian cities like Kunming are rapidly assuming global importance and embarking on major new development. CallisonRTKL’s design for the two 286-meter tall office towers anchoring Kunming Rainbow City was inspired by sky-reaching and solar-probing sunflowers. Unadorned but slender and tall, the towers incorporate an abstracted volumetric play of prismatic growths that shift and climb about their rooted and immoveable central stalk. Each prism originates from the intersection of preceding volumes where continuous vertical columns and core are exposed and highlighted. The curtain wall skin employs a delicate composition of glass and metal elements that catch and reflect light, enhanced with dye-sensitive photovoltaic modules that add a subtle layer of color.