Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters

Conceived during a sensitive period in the former colonys history, the brief for the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters was a statement of confidence: to create the best bank building in the world. Through a process of questioning and challenging - including the involvement of a feng shui geomancer - the project addressed the nature of banking in Hong Kong and how it should be expressed in built form. In doing so it virtually reinvented the office tower.

The requirement to build in excess of one million square feet in a short timescale suggested a high degree of prefabrication, including factory-finished modules, while the need to build downwards and upwards simultaneously led to the adoption of a suspension structure, with pairs of steel masts arranged in three bays. As a result, the building form is articulated in a stepped profile of three individual towers, respectively twenty-nine, thirty-six and forty-four storeys high, which create floors of varying width and depth and allow for garden terraces. The mast structure allowed another radical move, pushing the service cores to the perimeter so as to create deep-plan floors around a ten-storey atrium. A mirrored sunscoop reflects sunlight down through the atrium to the floor of a public plaza below a sheltered space that at weekends has become a lively picnic spot. From the plaza, escalators rise up to the main banking hall, which with its glass underbelly was conceived as a shop window for banking.

The bridges that span between the masts define double-height reception areas that break down the scale of the building both visually and socially. A unique system of movement through the building combines high-speed lifts to the reception spaces with escalators beyond, reflecting village-like clusters of office floors. From the outset, the Bank placed a high priority on flexibility. Interestingly, over the years, it has been able to reconfigure office layouts with ease, even incorporating a large dealers room into one floor - a move that could not have been anticipated when the building was designed.

Client: Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation
Consultants: Ove Arup & Partners, Northcroft Neighbour & Nicolson with Levett & Bailey, Roger Preston & Partners, Technical Landscapes Ltd, Claude and Danielle Engle Lighting/Bartenback Wagner Lichttechnische Planung GmbH, Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory, University of Western Ontario, Cini-Little Associates, Dieter Jaeger / Quickborner Team, Fitch & Chung, Humberside Maintenance Systems, John Lok / Wimpey Joint Venture, Jolyon Drury Consultancy, Mass Transit Railway, Professor Eric Lye, Project Planning Group