Located in the Nanshan District on Shenzhen’s west side, Minmetals Financial Center is designed as a corporate headquarters positioned alongside busy Binhai Avenue, a major artery through the heart of the city. The building addresses this prominent location through the use of a bowed façade inspired by a sail blowing in the wind. The arched facades are then glazed entirely with glass, intentionally contrasting with a stone base flanking the entrances to the tall lobbies on either side of the tower.

Responding to the context of having an interchange of two high-speed roadways right outside the building, the tower takes on a slender form while much of the site is left as a landscaped open space with water features and public art acting as a buffer to pedestrians from the nearby traffic. This open space then flows into the street fronting entrance for the tower positioned within a tall arcade framed by a large column supporting the northeast corner of the structure above.

The tower is framed with large X braces, each running through 12 floors and supplemented by additional belt trusses. The one story high belt trusses then wrap around slender tower at three different points in the building, including just above the lobby, the midpoint of the tower where the X braces join together and at the top of the building, just below the crown. The framework of the structure divides the building into two 12 story blocks of office space vertically stacked upon each other and set between the multi-story lobby and the crown of the building which is created trough an extension of the bowed façade beyond the main roofline. In the evening hours, the curved façade’s transparent glass then reveals the structural configuration of the tower as the braces become visible to the outside world.