SOM's twin-tower Sany IROOTECH headquarters in Guangzhou wins Best Tall Building Worldwide

At this year's Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) Awards, the title of Best Tall Building Worldwide went to the Sany IROOTECH Headquarters in Guangzhou. The complex pairs two towers, one 204 meters (670 feet) tall and the other 186 meters (610 feet), wrapped in an exposed hexagrid exoskeleton. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, Newsweek reported.

IROOTECH, a cloud technology firm within the Sany Group, a maker of construction equipment, uses the complex as its headquarters in the heart of Guangzhou's Pazhou business district. It was completed in December 2024. SOM, the Chicago-based firm behind the Burj Khalifa, wants to counter the "numbing sameness" of many new urban districts.

The CVU is an international body on tall buildings that promotes sustainable urban design and innovation, and it has held its awards since 2002. According to a council spokesperson who spoke to Newsweek, this year's nominees had to be finished between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2025.

That makes the winner worth a close look for anyone who commissions, engineers or runs a large office building. The prize went to a corporate headquarters, and its lead designer says the frame is its most innovative element.

The hexagrid frame, piece by piece

Brian Lee, the SOM consulting partner who led the design, told Newsweek that the exposed hexagrid exoskeleton and the way its parts connect are the most innovative features of the project. Many tall buildings rely on external structural frames, he noted. In his account, what sets Sany IROOTECH apart is an organizing unit: five-story modules built from mega columns, with floors suspended inside them. The goal is a structure that stays strong and can still accommodate movement when wind and seismic forces act on it.

That sideways movement is a central concern in tall-building engineering. In his 2018 text Design and Analysis of Tall and Complex Structures, Feng Fu writes that a structural engineer's first priority on a tall building is the lateral stability system, because lateral loads mainly drive the design and analysis.

Fu takes the point further. Story counts used to do the defining: below eight stories is low-rise, eight to 20 is mid-rise, and above 20 is tall. As supertall towers multiplied, he argues, that yardstick stopped working, so he proposes calling a structure a tall building when its lateral stability becomes the first priority in the design. By that test, Lee's description makes Sany IROOTECH a textbook case. The feature its designer singles out is the lateral system itself.

SOM has handled the same physics in a very different way before. According to Colleen Cabili of Quartz, the Burj Khalifa is organized around a buttressed core, with three wings branching from a hexagonal central spine so that each one braces the others against wind. As the tower climbs, the wings set back, so the wind never strikes the same flat face twice. That breaks up vortex shedding, a rhythmic swirling of air that can make a slender tower sway. The layout takes its cue from the Hymenocallis, a desert flower whose petals radiate outward, and from geometric patterns often found in Islamic architecture.

Same firm, two strategies. In Dubai, the wind solution sits in the floor plan and the silhouette. In Guangzhou, it is the exterior grid. For an owner's representative comparing structural concepts, that difference matters beyond looks, because it decides where the engineering lives and what the facade has to do.

A third answer stands in Shanghai. The 632-meter Shanghai Tower, designed by Gensler with Thornton Tomasetti as engineer, uses an elegantly twisted shape that reduces wind loads, according to ALLPLAN. Put the three side by side and the menu becomes clear: handle the wind with the plan, with the overall form, or with an expressed frame. Sany IROOTECH is the version where the structure is also the face the building shows the street.

A quarter of the Burj's height

Put the winner next to the tallest buildings and the gap is large. The taller Sany IROOTECH tower is 204 meters. The Burj Khalifa is 828 meters with 163 floors above ground, according to Quartz, and has been the tallest building since January 2010. Dividing one by the other gives roughly 0.25. The best tall building of this awards cycle is roughly a quarter the height of the tallest building on Earth, and the same Chicago firm designed both.

Merdeka 118, which ALLPLAN says was completed in 2023, also falls inside that eligibility window. The reporting does not say which projects made the shortlist, so this was not necessarily a head-to-head contest between the two. Still, the council's top prize going to a 204-meter headquarters suggests that its judges are weighing what a building does with its height, not only how much of it there is.

The CVU's chief executive, architect Javier Quintana de Uña, told Newsweek the project achieves a human scale that is rare for a tower its size. He went further, calling it "a total work of art, technology, and design." That phrasing puts the engineering on equal footing with the aesthetics, which fits a building whose structure and facade are the same object.

What the very top of the market costs

Research helps explain the gap between a 204-meter winner and the very tallest towers. A 2025 perspective in Springer's Discover Civil Engineering defines mega-tall buildings as 600 meters or more and counts only three completed since the Burj Khalifa, whose construction began in 2004. Only a few more are under construction. Its authors found that such towers need large investment and a strong economic case, which can be hard to make in volatile markets. Structural complexity, fire safety, sustainability, structural health monitoring and maintenance all require expensive, novel solutions at that height.

The Burj itself shows what that means in practice. ALLPLAN puts its construction at around six years and almost one billion euros, using 330,000 cubic meters of concrete. Quartz adds that the heat risked weakening the mix before it could cure. During the hottest months, crews therefore did their pours at night, and they pumped concrete to greater heights than any earlier project had managed.

The economic warning is not theoretical either. Quartz reports that Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia, planned to exceed 1,000 meters, halted construction in 2018 because of funding and contractor problems and still stands unfinished. For a corporate owner, the comparison suggests why a headquarters in the 200-meter class can chase structural ambition without taking on the financing and construction risk that sits at 600 meters and up.

Density, not altitude, as the brief

Newsweek places the award against accelerating urbanization. A June 2026 study in Geography and Sustainability forecasts that nearly 70 percent of the global population will live in cities by 2050. The United Nations reported in October 2021 that around 4.5 billion people live in cities, a figure expected to grow by nearly 50 percent by 2050. The UN also counts a global population of nearly 8.2 billion in mid-2024, projected to peak at about 10.3 billion in the mid-2080s.

Those numbers explain why tall buildings matter at all. A ScienceDirect topic summary describes them as structures that house large numbers of people on a smaller land area, a response to urbanization and density that can free open space at ground level. Yet the Springer authors note that, despite rapid urbanization, mega-tall development remains limited. Read together, the sources suggest that urban growth is being absorbed far below the record heights, in exactly the kind of tower this year's jury chose to reward.

The same Springer paper lists the technologies it expects to shape future mega-talls, including advanced vibration control mechanisms, eco-friendly materials, renewable energy systems, artificial intelligence and robotics. Vibration control is the item closest to Sany IROOTECH's story. Lee describes a frame designed to accommodate movement, which shows the problem of motion being addressed in the primary structure of a 204-meter building rather than saved for the tallest projects.

Where the exposed-frame lesson stops

The strongest objection is in Lee's own description. He presents the hexagrid as a response to wind and seismic forces, and for owners building where both loads drive the structural design, the Sany IROOTECH approach is a direct reference. Where those forces are milder, there is less structural reason to put the frame on the outside, and the design case would rest more on appearance and floor planning.

It is also one award from one jury in one cycle. The CVU hands out several honors, from an Urban Habitat Award to an Innovation Award, and a single winner is not proof of an industry trend.