November 12, 2026

Chinese skyscaper is CVU's building of the year

Photo credit Dave Burk (SOM) via CVU [enlarge]

ROOT Center in Guangzhou, China, won top honors at CVU’s Vertical Urbanism conference in October.

The Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) announced the winners of its annual Best Tall Building awards last month.

Top honors went to the Sany Irootech Headquarters (aka ROOT Center) in Guangzhou, China. Among the 10 Best Tall Building awards given this year, the skyscraper won three: best in Asia, best by height in the 200 – 299-meter category, and the best tall building worldwide. The project also won the structure award.

The ROOT Center, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) with architect of record Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, is the headquarters for Sany's cloud technology company Irootech. Sany is a heavy equipment manufacturer for industries such as construction and mining. Irootech focuses on industrial internet of things platforms. The campus was completed in December 2024 and consists of two mixed-use towers stretching 204 and 186 meters tall in Guangzhou's Pazhou district.

The office towers have an exposed hexagrid structural system made of concrete-filled tube columns hung from the frame on every four out of five floors creating day-lit, column-free floors inside.

An elevated podium spans the towers and provides a ground-floor public plaza with gardens and art. Inside the three-level podium is dining, retail and exhibition space. Podium gardens overlook ground-level covered walkways. Visitors can reach the elevated podium via a pedestrian bridge from an adjacent park.

“The Best Tall Building Worldwide award recognizes the project that best shows the path toward sustainable, efficient and innovative vertical urbanism,” explained Javier Quintana de Uña, CEO of CVU. “Sany IROOTECH Headquarters reinvents the idea of the monolithic tower, and of twin towers. Its elevated podium masters the meeting of vertical and horizontal, linking the street to the levels above, and it gives the city a high-quality public green space where private and public meet seamlessly.”

“Its structural solution, an organic exoskeleton, gives the interior complete flexibility,” Quintana de Uña added. “It blends art and fine design within a technical context, and above all it achieves a human scale where verticality feels natural and respectful. It is a total work of art, technology and design.”

“For tall buildings, the most efficient structure for lateral load resistance uses members in axial compression or tension, but that system isn't ductile when an earthquake comes,” said Mark Sarkisian, structural and seismic engineering consulting partner at SOM. “So we needed a system that is stiff for daily wind and moderate seismic movement but softens when the extreme earthquake comes, which could be 10 times the demand from the wind.”

“Instead of yielding and damaging the steel, we clamped common steel plates together with a friction material within the horizontal sections of the building's offset bracing, so in a big earthquake the bracing slides and dissipates the energy through friction and heat, like pressing the brake on your car,” Sarkisian continued. “We believe it's the future of seismic design for tall buildings.”

CVU's global headquarters are in Chicago. The organization began bestowing its best tall building awards in 2008.

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's headquarters remain in its founding city, Chicago, with offices worldwide, including Seattle.

Roger Heeringa of DCI Engineers has been CVU's Seattle representative (retiring this year).