Conceived as a meeting point for the district's outer streets, the project by Heatherwick Studio is governed by creating a natural meeting point, a vertical garden that, like a tree, branches out allowing visitors to climb its petals or terraces to a height from which they can observe the complex in its entirety with the different platforms, streets and terraces.
The project, inspired by the roofs of Chinese temples in the city of Xi'an, involves the creation of a new neighborhood that seeks to intertwine with its context and offer a new point of view of the city, linking its artisan past with a future vision of community life.
The Xi’an Culture Business District by Heatherwick studio. Photograph by Qingyan Zhu.
The Xi’an Culture Business District by Heatherwick studio. Photograph by Qingyan Zhu.
Project description by Leela Keshav
Emerging from the subway, a series of gently curving buildings rise before you, sunlight reflecting from their textured ceramic columns. It’s Saturday, and the streets are busy with shoppers lingering by the steps, chatting, taking photos, planning their day.
You and a friend travelled a few stops south of Xi'an’s historic centre to arrive at this bustling district. Now a few years old, the area has lost some of its original polish: it feels lived in, inviting, and slightly eccentric, its plant life maturing and beginning to spill over elevated terraces. You walk up shallow stone steps, a curved roof extending above like a gateway. Though immense, the buildings somehow feel more approachable than the dense high-rise blocks across the wide street behind you.
You’re sipping tea and chatting to your friend on a leafy terrace when you notice an unusual structure emerging from behind a shopfront. Your friend tells you that it’s the Xi’an Tree. It’s her favourite part of the district, she says, and you ask her to take you there.
Turning a corner, you find yourself in a plaza with paving stones arranged like giant ginkgo leaves, reminding you of the tree outside your childhood home. Your friend wants to visit a shop upstairs, so you call a lift, pressing an odd-shaped ceramic lift button. Rubbing your finger against its glazed crevices, you recall the ceramic tiles cladding the building: you’d touched those, too, noticing how each one was unique.
Finally, you make it to the Tree. It rises above you, fragrant and dense with foliage. Travelling up the vertical park that winds around its branching structure, you realise how biodiverse it is. Like a botanical garden, each section holds a unique array of plants, many of which you’ve never seen before. High above the pedestrians wandering on the terraces below, you see Xi’an extending before you, new and old interwoven in this lively metropolis.
Ancient Capital of China
Xi’an, the capital of Shaanxi province in central China, is famed for its temples, historic landmarks, and fortified city wall frequented by pedestrians and cyclists. Its legacy as an ancient capital is reflected in the 2000-year-old terracotta army built for Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s tomb. Holding over 8000 life-sized clay sculptures, the site draws millions of visitors each year. This, however, is just one facet of a culture of ceramics that continues to this day.
Home to over eight million people, Xi’an’s archaeological sites and bustling city centre make it a popular destination in any tourist’s itinerary. Meanwhile, the neighbourhoods outside its historic walls are a testament to China’s rapid urbanisation: tall residential blocks parade across the landscape, each a near exact replica of the last. Massive roads carve axes from the centre in an ever-expanding grid.
When presented with the task of designing a new district outside the city centre, Heatherwick Studio was faced with the question: could a peripheral area like this be shaped into a place worth visiting?
An Unusual Approach to a Usual Brief
The Xi’an Centre Culture Business District (CCBD) emerged during turbulent times, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, when Heatherwick Studio was invited to compete against three firms for a new shopping district south of the old city centre.
They had a distinct approach to what would otherwise be a standard commission: a large-scale shopping mall with a retail podium and mixed-use towers. Instead of drawing up yet another generic glass and steel monolith, the Heatherwick team attempted to rethink the shopping mall, redefining it as a place-specific and human-scaled urban district that could flourish as a cultural, social, and commercial centre. They wondered if in an era of mass industrialisation and cheap construction, might there still be value in an approach rooted in craft, care and long-term thinking?
With an area of 155,000 square metres, the vast site posed a challenge: surrounded by new construction, it didn’t retain any of the historic elements that give a sense of character to a place. Instead, it sat between the sparse ruins of Xi'an's Temple of Heaven to the east and the prominent Shaanxi TV tower to the west, at the intersection of old and new. The team recognised the importance of this urban positioning: according to Mat Cash, group leader and partner at Heatherwick, “the confluence of these two axes created the need for a heart, a moment that represented these directions coming together”.
For two years, the Heatherwick team and their China-based clients, developer group CR Land, communicated via Zoom, navigating barriers of language and proximity. Researching Xi’an’s complex history at a distance could only reveal so much; the team’s first in-person visit in 2023 was a transformative moment. Project leader Luis Sacristán Murga recalled being taken up the Huashan mountain, a sacred site northeast of Xi’an, which transformed and enriched the approach to integrating topography within design. The ritualistic journey of ascending the mountain later inspired one of the design’s most significant elements, the vertical landscape of the Xi’an Tree.
Aside from the challenges of working at a distance, the scale and speed required of the development was daunting. Open in December 2024, the entire 155,000m² project – from inception to completion – has taken just four years, made possible by the work of over 3,000 builders on site.
The team imagined this as place to discover and explore, revealing itself through walkable streets, gardens, and terraces. Despite its newness, they wanted it to feel visually complex, maybe even rough at the edges. And perhaps most importantly, they wanted it to resonate with the city of Xi’an, celebrating its history at the same time as pointing towards a softer, richer, more distinctive style of urban development in China.
City, Street, Door
It is no small feat to create a brand-new district that people are drawn to and empathise with. To do so, it needs “some of the spirit, variety, and texture that happens naturally in cities over time”, in the words of Mat Cash. The team sought to achieve this through thinking across multiple scales, considering how visual complexity, longevity, and a people-centric approach might inform their design on a city, street, and door level.
Their ambition to build human-scaled spaces demanded a radically different approach. Breaking big blocks down into smaller spaces conducive to socialising. Eliminating unnecessarily expansive planes of flat glass. Supplementing smooth, perfect finishes with textured materials that make you want to reach out and touch them. A typical shopping complex consists of a public podium that extends into offices or apartments in a tower above. This two-block monolith may be easy to design but offers little in terms of character, let alone beauty. Look closely, and you’ll see that although Xi’an’s new district has a podium and towers – accommodating 87,760 square metres of office space, 110,000 square metres of apartment space, and a 35,000 square metre hotel – these elements aren’t clearly distinguishable.
The shopping podium's stepped roofs – reaching a height of nearly 24 metres – lend the impression of a cluster of distinct buildings, stitched together by elevated terraces, gardens, and plazas. Supported by 78 columns and curving beams clad in earth-toned ceramic tiles, they nod to traditional Chinese nesting tables and pagodas. Lower at the district’s edges, the rooftops rise toward the centre, gesturing to the Xi’an Tree. As a whole, the district becomes like an ancient Greek agora: a place to see and be seen, and a social space as much as a commercial one.
Architecture and landscape merge: the podium’s roofscape is shaped into a garden, while glass walls bring the outdoors in. Referencing Xi’an’s much-loved street trees, vegetation weaves throughout the district. Paved terraces and sunken gardens held between the podium’s five levels provide places to gather and repose, take in the sun, or shelter under wide overhangs. This landscape spills over into the city, extending to the surrounding streets.
At a city scale, the district integrates Xi’an’s distinct grid system that far predates western uses of this kind of urban planning. However, instead of the usual flat grid structuring streets and blocks, this one extends upward, defining a three-dimensional urban system that provides a logic for complex geometries.
In all elements of the design, the team tried to avoid being generic. Rather than replicating the same paving pattern throughout – the easiest approach – the designers created patterns that lend a sense of wayfinding and cultural significance. In one area, the paving resembles ginkgo leaves, referencing Xi’an’s sacred 1400-year-old ginkgo tree that grows in the courtyard of the Guanyin Temple and symbolises longevity, endurance, hope, and peace.
The designers decided that even smallest elements merited full attention. Artisanal ceramics clad the buildings and also appear as lift buttons. Curving banisters end swollen into hand-sized spheres. Down to the most minute detail, the district tries to incorporate the tactility and atmospheric quality that any memorable place possesses.
A Vertical Park
Part botanical garden, part sculpture, the Xi’an Tree is the heart of the public space and a social resource. Standing over 57 metres high from the basement level, this is a gathering space at the centre of the district, serving the visitors and celebrating the city.
To ascend its branching structure is to travel the Silk Road in miniature, learning about Xi’an’s role in this ancient trade route. The city served as the eastern terminus of the 4000-mile road, the place where long journeys would both start and end.
The Tree’s 56 elevated ‘petals’ – diamond-shaped terraces six to seven metres in length that spiral up from a central trunk – represent each of the seven biomes crossed by the Silk Road, from Turkey to eastern China.
Beginning in the Temperate Steppe, visitors follow a stepping stone path through the varied colours and textures of the Alpine Tundra, Motane Forest, Temperate Boreal Forest, and Xeric Shrubland, finally emerging at the Dry Steppe for a view encompassing the district and the city beyond.
An inner spiral staircase and an elevator offer different ways to enjoy this sequence of cascading gardens that symbolise trade, ecology and togetherness.
Crafting Future Heritage
From the Tree’s metal structure to the podium’s interior finishes, the district is an exercise in contemporary craft. Unlike generic buildings that aspire to be physical manifestations of computer renders, the project team wanted this place to express the subtle imperfections of the artisanal making process that has defined Xi’an’s reputation for generations.
Handmade objects are never twice the same, and that makes them instantly relatable – as well as beautiful. In the words of Mat Cash, “the efficiency and perfection that industrialization brings quite often also removes the sense of humanity: we’re all flawed and relate to imperfection”.
Not only do ceramics respond to Xi’an’s cultural context, but they also humanise the district by creating visual complexity, three-dimensional textured surfaces, and a better visitor experience. The team devised a plan for 30,000 square metres of ceramic tiles to clad the buildings: a huge quantity, but not an impossible task with modern manufacturing.
However, a standard machine-made tile wouldn’t cut it. The designers wanted each tile to be unique, reflecting the ability of Xi’an’s artisans. And it takes a rare client willing to clad a massive shopping complex in crafted tiles. Luckily, CR Land was up for the challenge, encouraging the construction of to-scale mock-ups of structural and material assemblies.
But were the artisans? Small-scale artisans didn’t have the facilities to produce the vast quantities the project required. On the other hand, large manufacturers were kitted out to mass-produce identical, blemish-free tiles. This conundrum kickstarted a year-and-a-half period of testing, collaborating, making, and re-making.
The designers looked for a middle ground, scaling up artisanal producers and inspiring large-scale companies to embrace the idea of handcraft. Visits to ceramics factories were key, initiating a reciprocal learning process: the designers carried out over 2000 experiments while the manufacturers deepened their understanding of the design’s aspirations. This in-situ engagement translated into further unconventional material experimentation, including 1:1 scale prototyping.
Curved and ribbed, the final set of over 100,000 metre-long tiles are extruded into unique forms and glazed in three to nine layers, creating mesmerising swirls of brown and cream that dance across their surfaces in mottled archipelagos.
In this latest period of China’s transformation, traditional knowledge-keepers retain ancient ways of moulding clay. But this skill and craft could quickly disappear. Heatherwick Studio’s tiles seem at once archaic and forward-looking, carrying on long-held traditions but transforming them to suit a large contemporary project. Only time will tell if these not-quite-handmade tiles prove to be as durable as their traditional counterparts.
One-Off or Prototype?
So, could a project like Xi’an CCBD translate into different contexts? In some respects, the client’s boldness and budget created a unique opportunity for Heatherwick to test key ideas. Through the client’s invitation to experiment, the project became a piece of live research, leading to new modes of fabrication and ways of designing that could be carried forward by anyone in any Chinese city.
Perhaps this kind of project will never happen in the UK, where new build developments at this scale are rare and artisanal traditions remain very far from the mainstream. Even the cultural connotations of shopping malls are different: in China, they are popular attractions for days out, while in the UK, though some remain busy, they’re often seen as bleak relics of post-war new towns or the wreckers of independent high streets.
But the real essence of this project lies in the value of craft and human-scale thinking, principles that could apply to any number of sites or uses. In the words of Luis Sacristán Murga, bringing an ethos of care and compassion “opens up a new way of designing a city as a crafted, handmade neighbourhood”.
Ultimately, a successful project comes from working with a building’s context, not imposing pre-conceived ideas onto it. Come with an open mind, and the site itself – and the people around it – may guide you to the best ideas.
