Sitting at the confluence of China’s two major rivers, the Yangtze and Jialing, Raffles City Chongqing has become a new symbol for the city, with its design recalling the site’s historic role as an imperial city gate and maritime trading post. The project continues the firm’s exploration of vertical neighborhoods, livable urban communities, and thoughtfully connected public spaces.
Embedded within the city’s densely developed grid, Raffles City Chongqing—which combines office, residential, hotel, serviced apartments, retail, and recreational facilities—has sparked revitalization around its waterfront site. Located at the heart of one of the world’s fastest growing cities in an area with limited public parks, the development provides over 30,000 sq. m. of public space including outdoor and community gathering spaces. The development integrates multiple access points aligned with the city’s undulating topography, an innovative traffic diversion system, and a new public walkway that cuts through the five levels of the retail mall to provide a direct connection between the podium park and Chaotianmen Square.
Retail Podium
To provide a sense of orientation with the surrounding city, the three main gallerias of the mall align with and are a conceptual continuation of the principal north-south streets of the city. Set between the towers, the gallerias create logical interior ‘streets’ that run through the retail podium towards Chaotianmen Square. Each of these interior streets are generously endowed with natural light from continuous skylights that offer views of the towers above. Two additional gallerias run east to west and provide visitors with views towards the Jialing and Yangtze Rivers. This system of gallerias, punctuated by the nodes at their intersection, allows visitors to orient themselves within the 235,000 sq. m. mall, which is one of the city’s largest.
The Raffles City Shopping Mall opened with 95% committed occupancy and anchor tenants including leading movie theater chain CGV, online-to-offline retail store Jiwu by Suning, interactive play museum Cartoony, and Ole gourmet supermarket. The mall reported strong shopper traffic of over 900,000 people during its opening weekend in September 2019, with sustained average daily shopper traffic of about 100,000 visitors in the months after.
Interior Design
Safdie Architects worked closely with each of the specialty interior design firms to ensure that the overall design vision for the project—creating a sense of continuity and connection to the unique landscape and urban character of Chongqing—came through in the design and detailing of the interior public spaces.
Sustainability
The design of the building systems at Raffles City Chongqing integrates the latest technologies that contribute greatly to the improved overall performance of the development, while responding to the unique environmental stressors of its site.
Raffles City Chongqing features a rainwater management system, as well as a building management system, that monitors and controls equipment to substantially reduce
energy and resource consumption, while the development’s district cooling and heating system produces an additional energy cost savings over standard systems.
Raffles City Chongqing is the largest development in western China to receive the LEED-CS (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design - Core & Shell) pre-certification at the Gold Level by the United States Green Building Council
(USGBC).
