Sany IROOTECH Headquarters Named 2026 Best Tall Building Worldwide by Council on Vertical Urbanism

Guangzhou project with an exposed hexagrid frame takes the top honor as CVU announces its overall award winners at the 2026 VU Summit in London

Chicago, Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) has named Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, in Guangzhou, China, the 2026 Best Tall Building Worldwide. The project was selected from global submissions to CVU’s highly anticipated annual Award of Excellence program, which this year presented 84 honors, including two Lifetime Achievement Awards, across 20 countries. The award was conferred last night at a ceremony and dinner at the 2026 VU Summit in London, the organization’s premier gathering of the year. (A complete list of category winners appears below.)

“The Best Tall Building Worldwide award recognizes the project that best shows the path toward sustainable, efficient and innovative vertical urbanism,” explained Javier Quintana de Uña, CEO of CVU. “Sany IROOTECH Headquarters reinvents the idea of the monolithic tower, and of twin towers. Its elevated podium masters the meeting of vertical and horizontal, linking the street to the levels above, and it gives the city a high-quality public green space where private and public meet seamlessly.”

“Its structural solution, an organic exoskeleton, gives the interior complete flexibility,” Quintana de Uña added. “It blends art and fine design within a technical context, and above all it achieves a human scale where verticality feels natural and respectful. It is a total work of art, technology and design.”

Sany IROOTECH Headquarters: Giving the ground back to the city

Commissioned by Sany Group for its cloud-technology venture IROOTECH and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), with Beijing Institute of Architectural Design (BIAD) serving as the architect of record, the two mixed-use towers rise 204 and 186 meters in Guangzhou’s Pazhou district and were completed in December 2024. An elevated podium spanning the towers frees the ground for a public plaza with gardens and art, while the three levels above offer dining, retail, exhibition space and extensive garden overlooks and connect to the district’s covered walkways, so public and private space meet from the street up.

An exposed hexagrid of concrete-filled steel tube columns wraps both towers like an exoskeleton, with four of every five floors hung from the frame to create column-free, daylit floors. That flexibility and design resiliency allowed office floors to be adapted to residential uses during construction. Every fifth level opens onto a tree-planted terrace that shades the façade, and the towers also include a sky garden. The project was designed to meet China Green Building Label Three-Star and LEED Gold standards.

Tang Xiuguo, co-founder and rotating chairman of Sany Group, credited SOM’s architectural vision and structural engineering, together with Sany’s own construction technologies, for completing the headquarters in just three years. “It is a special gift from Sany to celebrate our 40th anniversary,” he said.

Tang added that the project’s vision of vertical greenery and sustainable development helped it win approval to exceed a 200-meter height limit. “The public loves it because the striking Sany IROOTECH Headquarters stands in visual dialogue with Guangzhou’s iconic Canton Tower, affectionately known as the ‘Slim Waist,’ creating a new landmark for the city,” he said.

“This award validates Sany’s trust in us to explore solutions beyond the ordinary today,” said Brian Lee, consulting design partner at SOM. “In addition to the innovative, performative aspects of the architecture and engineering, evident in the expressive structure and lifted podium, we were striving for a more humane design—one that considered meaningful connections to nature, focused on a truly contextual and civic public realm, and intent on enriching the culture of the company and its people.”

Sany IROOTECH Headquarters earned its place among the contenders by winning both the Best Tall Building Asia and Best Tall Building (200–299 meters) awards, and it joins a distinguished group of recent Best Tall Building Worldwide winners that includes ZIN in No(o)rd, in Brussels (2025), Pan Pacific Orchard, in Singapore (2024) and Quay Quarter Tower, in Sydney (2023). The project also took the Structure award, which recognized its innovative approach to seismic design.

“For tall buildings, the most efficient structure for lateral load resistance uses members in axial compression or tension, but that system isn’t ductile when an earthquake comes,” said Mark Sarkisian, structural and seismic engineering consulting partner at SOM. “So we needed a system that is stiff for daily wind and moderate seismic movement but softens when the extreme earthquake comes, which could be 10 times the demand from the wind. Instead of yielding and damaging the steel, we clamped common steel plates together with a friction material within the horizontal sections of the building’s offset bracing, so in a big earthquake the bracing slides and dissipates the energy through friction and heat, like pressing the brake on your car. We believe it’s the future of seismic design for tall buildings.”

The winner emerged from a multistage process that began with a call for entries in late 2025. Multidisciplinary juries named Award of Excellence winners in each category this spring. The winners of the Best Tall Building height and regional categories advanced as contenders for the overall award, and the Best Tall Building by Height jury selected the worldwide winner from among them.

“It is always fascinating to come together with fellow jurors from different nationalities, representing all corners of the world and a wide range of professional backgrounds,” said Ariane Dienstag, chair of the Best Tall Building by Height jury, founder of Paris-based consultancy Ariane Dienstag sas, founder of CVU’s French Chapter and a member of the CVU College of Fellows. “Each of us reviewed this year’s projects independently, without any communication with the others, and it is remarkable to see how closely our selections converge.”

For Dienstag, public life was the defining trait of the 2026 contenders, many of which took shape during the COVID-19 pandemic. “One quality stands out across almost all of the projects we assessed: their ability to be embraced and appropriated by the public,” she said. “These towers are democratic in the truest sense. They belong to the wider community, deliver quality housing, offices and public amenities across the full spectrum of the market, and reflect a growing need to question how buildings respond to a changing and increasingly unpredictable climate and context. Among its many qualities, Sany IROOTECH Headquarters hands its ground plane and podium to the city, proof that a tower can be far more than a vertical object or an architectural statement and can leave its imprint on the city.”

2026 Award of Excellence category winners

• Best Tall Building Worldwide: Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, Guangzhou, China
• Best Tall Building (under 100 meters): Punggol Digital District, Singapore
• Best Tall Building (100–199 meters): EZ Parque da Cidade, São Paulo, Brazil
• Best Tall Building (200–299 meters): Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, Guangzhou, China
• Best Tall Building (300 meters and above): JPMorganChase Tower, New York City, United States
• Best Tall Building Americas: JPMorganChase Tower, New York City, United States
• Best Tall Building Asia: Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, Guangzhou, China
• Best Tall Building Europe: Floating Gardens, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Best Tall Building Middle East & Africa: Wasl Tower, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Best Tall Building Oceania: Parkline Place, Sydney, Australia
• Urban Habitat Award: Punggol Digital District, Singapore
• Future Project Award: The Living Bridge, Shenzhen, China
• Construction Award: JPMorganChase Tower, New York City, United States
• Repositioning Award: 33 Alfred Street, Sydney, Australia
• Innovation Award: Motioneering Opposed Pendulum Tuned Mass Damper (TMD)
• Structure Award: Sany IROOTECH Headquarters, Guangzhou, China
• Façade Award: CPIC Xintiandi Commercial Center, Shanghai, China
• Systems Award: WeBank Headquarters, Shenzhen, China
• Space Within Award: JPMorganChase Tower, New York City, United States
• Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Award: Punggol Digital District, Singapore
• 10 Year Award: Oasia Hotel Downtown, Singapore

Since 2002, the CVU Award of Excellence program has recognized built and proposed projects that advance sustainable vertical urbanism across architecture, engineering, construction, urban design and policy. For the full slate of 2026 winners, visit verticalurbanism.org/resources/award-recipients.

High-resolution images of Sany IROOTECH Headquarters are available in SOM’s press kit. Photo credit: Dave Burk © SOM.

About the Council on Vertical Urbanism

The Council on Vertical Urbanism (CVU) is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing tall buildings and responsible density in cities across the globe. Its extensive network of members worldwide spans nearly every discipline essential to constructing, connecting and sustaining the built environment—from architecture, engineering and real estate development to planning, policy and public investment—driving engagement, innovation and the meaningful transformation of urban areas. CVU disseminates industry-leading knowledge through hundreds of multidisciplinary programs each year: conferences, awards, funded research and academic partnerships, all anchored by a rich repository of publications and online resources, including the most comprehensive database of detailed information and images for 45,000+ tall buildings internationally. Best known as the global arbiter of building height, conferring the official title of “world’s tallest building,” CVU is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Toronto, Shanghai and Venice.

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Attachments

• Sany IROOTECH Headquarters Named 2026 Best Tall Building Worldwide by Council on Vertical Urbanism
• Guangzhou project with an exposed hexagrid frame takes the top honor as CVU announces its overall award winners at the 2026 VU Summit in London

Charles Mutscheller
Council on Vertical Urbanism
cmutscheller@cvu.org