Horizontal Skyscraper: The Crystal at Raffles City Guide

The Crystal is a horizontal skyscraper, a 300 metre long glass skybridge suspended roughly 250 metres above the ground at Raffles City Chongqing in China. Designed by Moshe Safdie, it links the tops of four towers and holds public gardens, restaurants, event spaces and an infinity pool inside one continuous structure.

Most tall buildings reach for the sky in a straight line. The Crystal does the opposite. Stretched across the rooftops of the Raffles City Chongqing complex, it turns the idea of a tower on its side and asks what happens when you put a fully usable building in the air rather than on the ground. The result is one of the most talked about pieces of recent Chinese architecture, and a clear example of how engineering can change what a skyline looks like.

What Is a Horizontal Skyscraper?

A horizontal skyscraper is a tall structure laid on its side, where the long dimension runs across the air instead of up toward it. Rather than stacking floors on a single footprint, the building bridges between supports, often several separate towers, so the occupied space hangs high above the city. The Crystal fits this description exactly. It rests on top of four of the towers at Raffles City Chongqing and spans the gaps between them, giving visitors a 300 metre walk through gardens and lounges with the rivers of Chongqing on both sides.

The format is rare because it is hard to build. A vertical tower channels its weight straight down into the foundation. A horizontal one has to carry that load sideways, across long spans, while resisting wind and the movement of the towers it sits on. Few projects attempt it at this scale, which is why The Crystal draws comparisons with other record breaking city skylines around the world. The payoff is space that no normal tower can offer: a long, open level high in the air, lined with glass on both sides, where the city reads as a continuous panorama rather than a single framed window.

The Crystal at Raffles City Chongqing

Raffles City Chongqing sits in the Yuzhong District, at the tip of the peninsula where the Yangtze and Jialing rivers meet. The development holds eight towers in total. Six southern towers rise to 250 metres and two northern towers reach 350 metres, with the tallest measured at about 354.5 metres and 67 floors. Five of the towers hold apartments, including one of the northern towers that ranks among the tallest residential buildings in China.

Who Designed It?

The project was designed by Moshe Safdie of Safdie Architects, the same studio behind Marina Bay Sands in Singapore. The two share a clear family resemblance, since both place a long horizontal element across the top of multiple towers. CapitaLand developed the complex, the architect of record was P&T Group, and China Construction Third Engineering Bureau built it. Work started around 2013, the structure topped out in January 2019, and the complex opened on 6 September 2019.

Engineering the World’s Highest Skybridge

The engineering is what makes a building like this possible. The skybridge sits on four of the 250 metre towers and is held inside a folded steel frame that behaves like an accordion, which the design team calls a concertina structure. This shape lets the bridge flex slightly as the towers sway in the wind and as temperatures change across the day, without cracking the glass or stressing the joints. Structural engineering was handled by Arup, who also acted as the project’s sustainability consultant.

Two of the towers do not touch the main span directly. Instead, the 350 metre northern towers connect to the Crystal through cantilever bridges that push out into open air. That detail is part of why the structure holds a record. The bridge is the highest in the world to join this many towers at once, and it is often placed second only to the Sky Bridge at Riyadh’s Kingdom Centre in raw height. For context on that comparison, see our look at the Kingdom Centre Tower.

The Crystal at a Glance

The table below pulls the core facts of The Crystal into one place.

Life Inside the Crystal

The Crystal is not a sealed mechanical bridge. It is a place people walk through. Inside the 300 metre span sit gardens, several restaurants and bars, event halls, a hotel lobby and a members-only clubhouse with a 50 metre infinity pool. An observation deck near the top draws visitors who want the view across the two rivers, and a glass-bottom section was later added so guests can look straight down the face of the towers. The mix matters because it keeps the bridge active. A purely structural link would stand empty for most of the day, while a deck full of gardens, dining and a hotel gives people a reason to be there from morning to night, which is rare for a structure this high.

Putting amenities in the sky frees up the ground. Because the shared spaces live inside the bridge, the lower levels of the complex give more room to retail, transit links and public plazas. The planted terraces and gardens inside the Crystal also extend the same approach to greenery seen in many green urban spaces, only lifted a quarter kilometre into the air.

Why a Horizontal Skyscraper Matters for Cities

The Crystal points to a different way of thinking about density. A standard tower separates uses by floor and keeps people moving up and down. By spreading shared functions across a horizontal deck, The Crystal links several towers into one connected neighbourhood at height, with offices, apartments, a hotel and public amenities feeding into the same span. That logic sits close to the case for mixed-use zoning, where combining functions in one place cuts travel and keeps an area active through the day.

The idea is not entirely new. Skybridges that join towers go back decades, with the Petronas Towers being the best known early example. What changes here is scale and program. Instead of a narrow connection, the Crystal is a building in its own right. Architects watching this project read it as a signal that the next generation of dense districts may grow sideways at the top as much as straight up, an extension of the structural thinking explored in our form-finding in architecture coverage.

Looking Ahead

The most interesting thing about the Crystal may be how ordinary it makes the extraordinary feel. A 300 metre bridge full of gardens and pools, a quarter kilometre up, reads almost like a normal city street once you are inside it. If horizontal skyscrapers move from rare landmark to repeatable type, the question for designers shifts from whether a city can be built in the air to what kind of public life belongs up there.