Recently, the Xi’an Central Cultural Business District (CCBD) project, designed by Heatherwick Studio (UK) with façade design by Arup, was awarded the 2025 World Landscape Architecture (WLA) Award for Outstanding Commercial Landscape Design. This project is the only Chinese winner in the global commercial landscape category and has become a new urban landmark in Xi’an, integrating architecture, fashion, and commerce.
Located south of Xi’an’s historic city center, the CCBD project covers a total floor area of 1.21 million square meters and is renowned for its distinctive ceramic façade. The design team collaborated with local artisans, conducting over 2,000 firing experiments to produce more than 100,000 uniquely glazed ceramic panels. These panels cover the façades, columns, and curved beams, paying tribute to the famous Terracotta Warriors and providing a refined sensory experience in both visual and tactile aspects.
The large-scale, uniquely shaped façade system posed significant thermal design challenges: it needed to maintain the aesthetic integrity of the exterior while efficiently blocking thermal bridges, preventing condensation, and improving the overall energy efficiency of the building envelope. Conventional unitized curtain wall systems often have numerous high thermal conduction points, resulting in rapid heat transfer and condensation risks.
To overcome these challenges, the CCBD façade innovatively applied Warmframe’s high-performance curtain wall thermal insulation blanket technology. By combining thermal break systems and intelligent glass, the solution significantly reduces heat transfer from the exterior, ensuring continuous thermal insulation throughout the envelope. Warmframe’s high-performance insulation blankets are made of proprietary high-performance composite materials, which provide excellent thermal resistance, effectively preventing heat exchange between the interior and exterior, stabilizing indoor temperatures, and substantially reducing the load on heating and cooling systems. This not only enhances energy efficiency but also improves condensation performance and indoor comfort.
The Xi’an CCBD project successfully integrates modern design with traditional cultural elements, with Warmframe’s thermal insulation solutions playing a critical role in achieving green building and energy-saving objectives. Winning the WLA Award not only recognizes the aesthetic quality of the project but also acknowledges its innovative application of energy-efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. Warmframe is proud to contribute to such a landmark project and will continue to advance curtain wall thermal technologies to support global low-carbon and sustainable building goals.