New Apple store in Ningbo, China, with a facade design of concave glass panels that required immense technical ingenuity to realise.
Ningbo’s Tianyi Square is surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe of retail facilities. The new Apple store sits on this horseshoe, with a curved storefront to match the profiles of the surrounding buildings.
The store represents a first, using concave insulated glass panels that stand 12.5 metres tall.
The panels were prepared using a cold-bent lamination technique. Due to the unknown extent of the spring-back effect in cold-bent glass, comprehensive finite element analysis and modelling was required to predict behavior, with extensive laboratory testing.
Eckersley O’Callaghan also engineered the design of the building’s stone cladding.
