Welcome to the Yanqi Lake Kempinski Hotel located in China that has been designed so that it seems as if the sun is rising over the Yanqi Lake. The hotel has been designed by Shannghai Huadu Architect Design and the ‘rising sun’ view that it depicts can be experienced from the front.
The hotel, from the front, looks like a circular shape that rises about 97 meters (21 floors) into the sky, however, if you look at the overall design it resembles a disc that has been buried into the ground, partially.
It has an external surface area of 18,075 sq. meters and this surface has been covered with more than 1,000 glass panels, which impart a reflective and translucent effect to the hotel. One can see the lighting strips running up and over the height of the hotel and it look like an oval when you look at the hotel from the side.
Keeping the awesome looks of the hotel aside, there are other wonderfully engineered (yeah, we do use this term around here) features related to operation that have been incorporated into the hotel. As per news from Kempinski, the natural gas is used as the primary fuel for cooling and heating the building. The hotel is also the first in China to make use of a gas power generating system in order to slash the energy consumption. Photovoltaic panels have also been incorporated to generate electricity while the glazing done, to improve insulation, is 4-layered.
The hotel also has an air monitoring system for the indoor that improves the air quality and has been designed so that it is capable of withstanding earthquakes that are an 8 on the Richter scale. The construction of hotel took 24 months and 9,300 construction workers were part of the project. Check out the video below for more details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogl-hjkCFb4
