Lighting Up Hadid

Located in the new CBD of Hexi New Town, the two-tower project consists of a hotel, conference center, offices and parking. Even though it is described by ZHA as "Nanjing’s flagship development scheduled for completion in 2014," it opened only partially last summer when Nanjing hosted the 2014 Summer Youth Olympic Games. The towers are clad primarily in glass curtain wall, sitting above a base covered in GFRC (glass-fiber reinforced concrete).

Per the email from Philips, the 16 million-color palette of LED lights covering the 68-story towers costs less than 114 Euros a day to light, "because the building uses [their] energy-efficient dynamic color-changing computer controlled LED lighting system." Philips also supplied LED floodlights that give the impression that the lines of Hadid's towers extend even farther into the sky.