Bank of China Head Office, Beijing (中国银行总行大厦)

The headquarters was designed by I. M. Pei with his sons Chien Chung (Didi) and Li Chung (Sandi) Pei, whose firm Pei Partnership Architects, opened in New York in 1992, carried the project. Construction began in 1995, and the building was officially opened on 27 June 2001.

The building links three generations of the family to the Bank of China: Tsuyee Pei, I. M. Pei's father, had been an influential administrator of the bank in its early years, at the beginning of the twentieth century; I. M. Pei was the architect of the bank's tower in Hong Kong; his sons took over for this headquarters.

Beijing's height limits were introduced after Pei's first visit to the capital in 1974, when he urged the authorities to protect the Forbidden City. Twenty years later, when he took on the commission with his sons, he had to work within that rule: the 1.7-million-square-foot programme (about 158,000 m²) had to fit on three acres, a little over a hectare, without exceeding 135 feet.

To ventilate this mass, the architects carved out an eleven-storey atrium of about 3,000 m² (32,500 square feet) at its heart, covered by a space-frame skylight. The large space was conceived as a public indoor square: the design invited passers-by to cut through it from the Xidan shopping street to the great Chang'an avenue.

The atrium holds a Chinese garden of water, rocks and bamboo. The rocks, chosen one by one by the firm, come from the Stone Forest in south-west China; they travelled by train some 2,900 km before settling in a shallow pool about 38 cm deep. Each weighs roughly 5 to 10 tonnes and rests on one of the four post-tensioned girders that span the 2,000-seat auditorium below.

The exterior and interior are clad in the same Roman travertine from Italy, cut from a single quarry and finished with the same honed surface. Its buff colour was chosen to mask the desert sand carried from the Gobi, which settles on Beijing's grey buildings.

The Bank of China headquarters occupies a block in Xidan, at the corner of Chang'an Avenue and the Xidan shopping street, two blocks from the Forbidden City; its travertine mass lines the street at this crossroads.