NANJING | Jinling Fuguang | 518m | 108 fl | PRO

Chinese name: 金陵福光 Buy content through ScooptWords It's not often you see a unique skyscraper design these days, what with gherkins and turning torsos becoming ten-a-penny around the world but this design for the Chinese city of Nanjing might just pull it off. Called Jinling Fuguang, or the "Hand of Peace", if you don't speak Chinese, this huge project will have 108 floors above ground and be 518 metres tall. Accommodating a mixture of hotel, office and residential, as indeed most super towers do, it has been designed by architect Yu Zhu Zongshi. The scheme is effect a huge hand rising out of a slimmer wrist that will be clad in blue glass and tower above a large central podium. A shorter curving stepped building that shares this podium will be erected adjacent to it. There are hints of Chinese feng shu in the design although these have been scotched by the architect more as coincidence. For example feng shu experts would say that "the Jinling luck light" has been employed to the office-space but the architect denies that Chinese folk beliefs are referenced so deeply in the design claiming these are more coincidence than deliberate - a classic case of the audience giving architecture their own meaning. For Zhu, the scheme is more a case of a hand praying for an end to war saying that "the idea is to represent peace especially as Nanjing has suffered such injuries in war." If they do build this then what next for other Chinese cities? Perhaps Shanghai can do a Monty Python and erect a giant foot and ankle, stamped into the city centre in reply. http://www.skyscrapernews.com/news.php?ref=742 As far as I know, it's just a proposal. I don't think they'll approve it.>