Shangri-La Shougang Park in Beijing
- Barbara Zettel
To this day, cooling towers and a tall factory smokestack indicate the industrial prehistory of the five star hotel in Beijing's Shougang Park. The Milanese office of Lissoni Casal Ribeiro created the building, operated by the luxury hotel chain Shangri-La. Located 20 km west of the Chinese capital city, the hotel is situated on a nearly 9 km2 site. Until 2011 China's largest steel mill had been in operation here. Step by step and during the preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics, the Chinese government shut down the facility within a program aimed at reducing smog. In follow the site was transformed into a culture and leisure park. During the 2022 Winter Olympics, the freestyle skiing and snowboarding events took place here. At the time, the newly opened Shangri-La Shougang Park housed the Olympics Organizing Committee. The hotel complex consists of three rectangular building volumes arranged parallel to each other. The planners completely gutted the steel mill power plant. They redesigned the remaining concrete frame with steel roof structure as the main building of the complex. Enveloped by glass, the original structure remains visible from the exterior. Two new building volumes expand the complex westward. Their facades are clad in dark, grooved ceramic panels. The central volume expands the publicly accessible areas of the hotel. It borders the glazed structure and features a matching height of about 23 m. A bridge on the second floor connects the main building and the third volume. With its height of roughly 30 m, it is the tallest of the ensemble. It houses 282 guest rooms distributed across eight floors. Two vertical incisions loosen up the massive building complex. The facade is structured horizontally into three layers: Terraces and projecting awnings visually lift the building up from the ground. The second layer features a dark ceramic facade covering seven floors, interrupted by the vertically structured window elements of the guestrooms. Above the service floor, a brise soleil constitutes the topmost layer.
