Aedas-designed Commercial Bank Headquarters Project in Taichung, Taiwan, won the Tall Buildings category at MIPIM/The Architectural Review Future Project Awards 2018; while Andrew Bromberg at Aedas-designed Chengdu City Music Hall in Chengdu, China, received a commendation in the Cultural Regeneration category.

Designed by Chairman and Global Design Principal Keith Griffiths, Commercial Bank Headquarters Project is a 200-metre high tower located in the commercial centre of Taichung city. It comprises headquarters office space for Taichung Commercial Bank and luxury hotel accommodation. The design concept originates from the Chinese character ‘中’ on the logo of the Taichung Commercial Bank. Instead of stacking all functions in a singular tower, the design creates two separate towers with a vertical void in the middle to connect them and capture the large facilities. A series of ‘floating’ transparent glass boxes for large functions such as exhibition areas, sky gardens, conferencing facilities, a ballroom and a swimming pool is situated inside the void to enrich the building shape and create an eye-catching  feature along the main road. The rooftop terrace features a restaurant and VIP club with outdoor landscaped terrace, providing a spectacular balcony with magnificent city view.

Designed by Global Design Principal Andrew Bromberg, the Chengdu City Music Hall complex balances cultural components within a dense urban environment disconnected from its traditional connection to nature. The traditional Chinese landscape paintings or shan shui paintings – ‘shan’ refers to mountain and ‘shui’ to river – are evolved from the surrounding Sichuan landscapes. The use of positive and negative spaces in this art form portrays an interesting balance between the physical and the ephemeral. These relationships were explored in how to balance the ‘imagined’ creations of the performance venues and school of arts with the ‘tangibles’ of the buildings which contain them. The physical line between the tangible and the ephemeral was celebrated as a stepped public series of connected terraces. Beneath these terraces are the varying volumes of venues below; above these terraces are topographic bamboo gardens which provide an impression of the surrounding mountains. These accessible terraces step from the tall dense urban fabric towards the west and down to the more human scale pedestrian district to the east. The eastern edge is defined by an informal plaza which connects the project to the river and the arts district through the pedestrian ‘Music Avenue’. This project design is a competition entry.

The MIPIM/the Architectural Review Future Project Awards celebrate excellence in unbuilt or incomplete projects, spanning across 12 categories.