Guangzhou Circle: world’s tallest circular building

Guangzhou Circle rises on 33 floors for 138 m in height and 85,000 sq m of surface. It stands on the bank of the Pearl River on the southwestern edge of the city, at the ultra-modern south railway station of the high-speed trains. 

It is the tallest circular building in the world with the unique feature of an empty hole in the centre, also perfectly circular, with a diameter of 48 m. It has become embedded as one of the symbolic identities of the Chinese metropolis, a true southern gateway to the ‘Middle Kingdom’, but also a point of reference in the dialectic between East and West.

The building houses the headquarters of the Hong Da Xing Ye Group, the world’s largest trading centre for plastic materials. In 2014, CNN ranked it among the 10 most interesting buildings worldwide.

Joseph Di Pasquale’s declared desire was to design a building with a strong iconic value which would differ from the vertical tower, looking for a possible source of inspiration in the characters of Chinese writing; it is defined by its designer as an ‘urban ideogram’.

Many other meanings are linked with the shape of this building capable of creating a bridge between East and West and between Past and Present as well, from the classic jade discs with deep symbolic meanings, to the numerological tradition of Feng Shui.

In particular, the double disc of jade is the royal symbol of the ancient Chinese dynasty that ruled this land about two thousand years ago. The building, reflecting in the river water, forms exactly the same design, a double disc of jade. This figure also corresponds to number eight, which owns a strong propitiatory value in Chinese culture.

On the other hand, the Western tradition is also present in the concept of the building and expressed through a clear reference to the idea of ‘squaring the circle’ coming from the Italian Renaissance; in fact, the two circular facades contain and also structurally support groups of suspended floors which bring the perfect circumference of the facades back to the orthogonal ‘square’, to make the interior space a place to live.