Foster's HSBC building in Hong Kong is a revolutionary high-tech skyscraper
The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters was a ground-breaking skyscraper and established Norman Foster as a global brand. We take a look at the high-rise bank as part of our high-tech architecture series.
Designed with the simple brief of creating "the best bank headquarters in the world", the forty-four-storey skyscraper for HSBC set Foster's studio on the path to being one of the largest practices in the world.
Foster won the commission to design the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Headquarters, which is now called the HSBC Main Building, in 1979. This was only ten year's after he and Wendy Foster set up Fosters Associates, and 18 years before ownership of Hong Kong would be transferred from the UK to China. HSBC wanted a symbol of its power and a "visible demonstration of the bank's commitment to its birthplace". It would not only be the most expensive building ever built, but also the young studio's first project outside the UK and its first over three-stories tall.
The 99,000-metre-square skyscraper was revolutionary, as Fosters Associates chose to move the building's structure from its centre to its exterior ? a key feature of high-tech architecture, which is also clearly seen in Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano's Centre Pompidou in Paris.
"If I tried to give you a word picture of the Hong Kong tower, let's compare it with a typical tower of the day, which has a central core, there's a space around it, every elev...
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