Drawn up for the state-owned Beijing Kuntai Holding Group, the new visualisations show a 140m-tall Z8 Tower which will provide offices, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities across 170,300m2 of floor space.
The practice landed the job in 2024 following an international competition, which also attracted entries from the likes of Andrew Bromberg Architects.
According to ZHA, the tower will create a ‘vertical city’, combining workspace with hospitality and amenities, connected to the local subway and national rail network.
A series of verandas and atria runs up through the full height of the tower on the western façade, offering terraces with green planting designed to ‘bring the adjacent central park into the tower’s core’.
The project adds to ZHA’s significant and growing portfolio in the country. The company’s most recent accounts affirm a ‘long-standing commitment to China’.
Although turnover from Asia fell for the practice in the 2025 accounts compared with the previous year, the region still made up more than 30 per cent of its income.
The Z8 Tower will join several other ZHA-designed projects in China which have come to fruition recently, such as the Capital International Exhibition & Convention Centre, also in Beijing, which opened in February last year.
Construction on the new tower is due to start soon. The practice said: ‘The design welcomes the city into the heart of the building and establishes an inviting new window into the dynamism of Beijing’s Central Business District.’
Measures to manage the heating and cooling of the building include vertical external brise soleil fins in a unitised glazed system providing shading from the sun in Beijing’s hot summer months, while thermal enclosures minimise heat loss during the cold winters when temperatures average below freezing in the city.
Visualisation of ZHA’s Z8 Tower in Beijing
Source: Atchain