Since 1986, our main building at 1 Queen\u2019s Road Central, in Hong Kong, has been an eye-catching landmark on the city\u2019s skyline. Forty years after the building he designed opened, architect Lord Norman Foster, who is now 92, came back for an anniversary tour.<\/p>\n
In his own words below, he explains how the building\u2019s construction challenged the traditional office building concept and was a beacon for the future.<\/p>\n
The brief was to create the best bank building in the world \u2013 that was about Hong Kong, it was about the bank, and about the community. <\/p>\n
The big move was to take everything out of the heart of the space and to move it to one side to create open loft spaces; to celebrate the views to the Peak and water and offer uninterrupted lines of sight \u2013 good for communication; and to break it down into zones so you had communal areas where people could communicate.<\/p>\n
The challenges were logistical \u2013 how you brought packaged elements from faraway places around the globe, brought them here and then seamlessly integrated them. I remember us using many devices to anticipate and convey how it would look.<\/p>\n
This building set off a train of further explorations in terms of tall buildings. It encouraged large volumes to break up the mass of a building and to introduce nature into the buildings with an ecological, sustainable element. These ideas were manifested in our more recent tall building designs.<\/p>\n
Forces of nature \u2013 from feng shui to typhoons \u2013 were woven into the engineering of the building<\/p>\n
Early on, I was told that HSBC would take care of the site\u2019s \u2018feng shui\u2019 \u2013 an aspect unfamiliar to me at the time. That immediately inspired me to speak with a feng shui expert. In the end, our design had the escalators on a line of axis that subliminally followed his advice.<\/p>\n
I remember running seminars, involving external consultants that I brought in, to identify what the priorities of the bank were \u2013 in terms of space planning, efficiency, future image. I really want to underline the collaborative aspects of the project.<\/p>\n
The lessons we learned by being here had to do with the importance of shading and using seawater cooling \u2013 in short, exploring emerging ideas of sustainability and flexibility. We also needed to account for future typhoons.<\/p>\n
During construction, in 1983, we experienced Typhoon Ellen and had to angle the cranes into the line of the typhoon wind force to minimise wind resistance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since 1986, our main building at 1 Queen\u2019s Road Central, in Hong Kong, has been an eye-catching landmark…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[20667],"tags":[31444,20855,22727,1278,31445,3245,9881,22095,31443,31442,721],"class_list":["post-67246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-hsbc","tag-back-to-the-future","tag-banking-innovation","tag-customer-experience","tag-digital-transformation","tag-future-of-banking","tag-heritage","tag-hsbc","tag-hsbc-news","tag-hsbc-news-archive","tag-news-and-views","tag-sustainability"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116785450981604797","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}