Recently, the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center construction project in Jiangsu Province, undertaken by China Construction Third Engineering Bureau, a central enterprise based in Hubei, has been fully completed. This means that Suzhou and even the Yangtze River Delta region have added a brand-new landmark building.

Located on the shore of East Taihu Lake in Wujiang, Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center is China's first urban cultural complex integrating venues and functions such as a grand theater, cinema, museum, convention and exhibition center, and planning exhibition hall. The project covers a total site area of about 9 hectares and a total construction area of 215,000 square meters, equivalent to two Sydney Opera Houses.

The Suzhou Bay Cultural Center complex includes a grand theater with 1,600 seats, a multifunctional hall with more than 600 seats, a 24,000-square-meter museum, an 18,000-square-meter exhibition center, a 14,000-square-meter conference center, a cinema with seven halls, and 14,000 square meters of supporting commercial facilities.

... participated in the design of the acoustic structure of the grand theater's performance hall.

The person in charge of the China Construction Third Engineering Bureau project department told a reporter from China Building Materials News that the reason the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center is called a new landmark and new calling card of Suzhou is that the project is unique in aspects such as design concept, architectural form, construction technology, and functional integration, and is highly distinctive of the Jiangnan region and the cultural "temperament" of Gusu.

Taking Suzhou silk and the water sleeves of Kunqu opera as design prototypes, the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center "weaves" the two landmark venues, the Suzhou Bay Grand Theater and the Wujiang Expo Center, into two lightweight "ribbons." People can stroll freely on the "ribbons" and take in the beauty of Taihu Lake and the scenery of the entire Wujiang New City.

The seemingly graceful "ribbons" are actually assembled from 3,000 tons of steel. Among them, the high-level "ribbon" is about 250 meters long, and the low-level "ribbon" is about 380 meters long, with a maximum span of nearly 100 meters. They are the longest and largest-span spatial curved-twisted tubular trusses in China.

The main structure of the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center is mainly steel structure, with a total steel consumption of 18,000 tons. The project extensively adopts curtain-wall-integrated inclined wall structures, which not only maximize the use of interior space but also visually present a light-and-shadow beauty of "connected yet not transparent."

During the construction of the Suzhou Bay Cultural Center, the China Construction Third Engineering Bureau project department innovatively proposed segmented assembly and posture positioning technology for spatial curved-twisted circular tube trusses, a four-direction coordinate control method for pipe openings, and an inner arc point re-measurement method, achieving the perfect spatial curved-twisted form of the "ribbons." At the same time, it adopted synchronous lifting technology with independent tower frames for 100-meter-span spatial curved-twisted tubular trusses, and a construction plan based on displacement control as the main method and reaction control as the auxiliary method, with staged overall graded synchronous unloading controlled proportionally, ensuring the safety and reliability of the construction process. The research and application results of the design and construction technology for 100-meter-level-span flexible spatial curved-twisted tubular truss structures were appraised by the Jiangsu Civil and Architectural Society as "reaching the international advanced level," filling a gap in the relevant domestic field.