The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has completed a remarkable new headquarters building for JOMOO Group in Xiamen, China, featuring a distinctive facade of white ceramic stripes that change direction and tilt at different angles throughout the 755-foot tower. The design represents a significant architectural achievement that balances sculptural ambition with corporate functionality, creating a landmark building for China's largest bathroom and kitchen company.
The tower draws conceptual inspiration from OMA's acclaimed Seattle Central Library completed in 2004, which featured a continuous skin wrapping programmatic elements into an iconic form. However, while the Seattle library was transparent and crystalline, the JOMOO Headquarters presents a denser, more rigid appearance with a disjunctive form that performs complexity with restraint. The building stands as a prominent addition to Xiamen's skyline, a coastal city in southeastern China undergoing rapid high-density urbanization.
Xiamen, historically a major treaty port and gateway for maritime trade, now serves as a global manufacturing hub. JOMOO Group, the client for this project, has established itself as China's leading bathroom and kitchen company, known for luxury products like the futuristic T9G Wall-Hung Toilet, which features advanced technology including a rimless inner bowl, double-vortex 360 tornado flush, and rare earth glaze infused with zinc oxide.
From a distance, the headquarters displays remarkable elegance with its bright, composed appearance that stands unwavering on the skyline. The building's upper section features an army of vertical stripes, evenly spaced and clad in white ceramic panels, climbing an orderly facade to a stark, flat top. This minimal aesthetic with soaring verticals recalls 20th-century architectural classics such as Raymond Hood's Daily News Building, Edward Durell Stone's General Motors Building in New York, and Philadelphia's PSFS by George Howe.
However, at the tower's mid and lower sections, the building takes on a more contemporary and curious character. The facade buckles into substantial triangular segments, while the ceramic-paneled stripes become displaced and tilted, creating a dynamic visual effect. As these ceramic stripes tilt and change direction, the tower flares outward toward the base, creating a form that suggests various interpretations including crystalline growth, organic development, folded paper, or digital modeling techniques.
OMA partner Chris van Duijn explained the design philosophy to Architect's Notebook, stating that urban guidelines initially prescribed a traditional tower-on-podium format. "But we wanted to reflect the conditions of the location, which we found interesting," van Duijn said. "One side faces a green hill, the other the new Central Business District. The volume is therefore partly topography, partly building." This approach led the design team to merge the base and tower into a single unified form that references the region's rocky terrain.
The building's irregular geometry is carefully orchestrated through large triangular segments defined by concrete girders, within which the ceramic-clad stripes change direction. These thickened edges of the triangular segments follow their own geometric logic, free from orthogonal constraints, while metal and glass spandrels continue in strict horizontal bands between them. The result is a facade that exhibits large surface deformations adding variation to the typical corporate office building type.
Material selection proved crucial for the design team, particularly since building codes limited glass to 60 percent of the exterior surface, giving solid elements greater visual presence. While metal and glass fiber reinforced concrete were considered as alternatives, ceramic was ultimately chosen for its appealing qualities in elongated proportions. The numerous solid elements lining the perimeter contribute to solar shading and, in some areas, incorporate integrated drainage and ventilation systems.
Inside the building, expansive open-plan floor plates span from a split core system to columns along the perimeter. The facade system creates apertures of varying orientations—some slanted, others upright—resulting from the assertive stripe pattern penetrating through the building enclosure. From the open-plan workspaces, these slanted apertures frame views around the perimeter, though from the office levels, these architectural collisions read more as practical elements of daily work life rather than dramatic architectural statements.
The facade design touches down at street level, carefully tracing the building's footprint and creating a clear entry sequence. At the entry corner, the baseline rises cleanly to a point, naturally guiding visitors toward the main lobby. The project represents a successful collaboration between multiple firms, with OMA serving as design architect, Huayi Design as architect of record, VS-A Group providing facade consulting services, and NBK Architectural Terracotta supplying the distinctive ceramic cladding materials that give the building its striking appearance.
