The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) headquarters building, in

Central, Hong Kong, took seven years to complete from concept to construction and has
become not only the icon for the region’s largest bank but the city of Hong Kong itself.
It’s the fourth HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong.(1)
The new building was designed by the British architect Norman Foster and civil &
structural engineers Ove Arup & Partners with service design by J. Roger Preston &
Partners. It was constructed by the John Lok / Wimpey Joint Venture. From the concept
to completion, it took seven years (1978–1985). The building is 180 metres high with 47
storeys and four basement levels.The building has a modular design consisting of five
steel modules prefabricated in the UK by Scott Lithgow Shipbuilders near Glasgow, and
shipped to Hong Kong. About 30,000 tons of steel and 4,500 tons of aluminium were
used.
The original design was heavily inspired by the Douglas Gilling designed Qantas
International Centre in Sydney (currently known as Suncorp Place).
he new lobby and its two-part Asian Story Wall were designed by Greg Pearce, of One
Space Limited. Pearce was also the Principal Architect of the Hong Kong Airport
Express (MTR) station. Conceived as a minimalist glass envelope, the new lobby is
designed to be deferential to Foster’s structure and appears almost to be part of the
original.
The building is also one of the few to not have lifts as the primary carrier of building
traffic. Instead, lifts only stop every few floors, and floors are interconnected by
escalators.(2)
The following pages and images come from a document, The HSBC Building, written by
Phillip Steffy and Shawn Chen in the Fall of 2007 and maintained on the website of the
College of Architecture, Texas A&M University, USA. While it doesn’t show the day-to-
day construction of the building it does highlight several considerations to be dealt with
in its design and structural problems encountered that needed to be overcome.
IDJ has sent images of the actual construction of the HSBC building in Hong Kong which
will be posted shortly and linked to this article.