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.

Location
Macau, China

Client
Apple

Architect
Foster + Partners