Located on the banks of the Pear (Zhujiang) River, Canton Tower stands across from the new main central business district of Guangzhou and creates a visual axis through the center of the city’s tallest skyscraper cluster. The axis begins in a park space to the south of the tower footprint and travels northward, crossing the river and running through the center of a large rooftop park spanning the top of a subterranean mall ringed with high-rise buildings. Continuing northward, the axis passes through additional open spaces, bisects a stadium and ends at CITIC Plaza, Guangzhou’s first supertall building, completed in 1996.

Canton Tower was constructed as a composite tube-in-tube design, featuring a reinforced concrete core containing all of the tower’s services and vertical transportation which is then set inside an outer structure made up of a steel lattice. The two structural components then frame a series of smaller structures suspended within the tower at different elevations. The smaller structures contain occupiable spaces with elliptical floor plates which rotate in orientation over the height of the tower. The rotation is then expressed to the outside of the tower through the twisting form of the steel skeletal structure, further emphasized through tapering inward to midpoint before expanding outward towards the uppermost levels. The roofs of the smaller structures within the tower have publicly accessible skygardens, allowing visitors to experience the variations of weather at different heights while serving as outdoor observation decks.

The slender form of the tower’s design makes it especially vulnerable to sway on windy days, creating the possibility for stresses on the structure and uncomfortable conditions for the occupants. As such, the design required the inclusion of a tuned mass damper system, the final compilation of which is comprised of a hybrid mass damper utilizing two 650 ton water tanks supplemented by motorized active mass dampers working in synch as the structure begins to move.

After sunset, the entire structure is illuminated in a light display of changing colors through an integrated system of LED fixtures; ensuring Canton Tower is a highly visible feature of the Guangzhou skyline during the day or night.