Back to the future: Architect Lord Norman Foster revisits our
Hong Kong HQ

Since 1986, our main building at 1 Queen’s Road Central, in Hong Kong, has been an eye-catching landmark on the city’s skyline. Forty years after the building he designed opened, architect Lord Norman Foster, who is now 92, came back for an anniversary tour.

In his own words below, he explains how the building’s construction challenged the traditional office building concept and how it was shaped and developed with a tilt to the future.

The brief was to create the best bank building in the world – that was about Hong Kong, it was about the bank, and about the community.

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 – good for communication; and to break it down into zones so you had communal areas where people could communicate.

The challenges were logistical – 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.

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.

Forces of nature – from feng shui to typhoons – were woven into the engineering of the building

Early on, I was told that HSBC would take care of the site’s ‘feng shui’ – 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.

I remember running seminars, involving external consultants that I brought in, to identify what the priorities of the bank were – in terms of space planning, efficiency, future image. I really want to underline the collaborative aspects of the project.

The lessons we learned by being here had to do with the importance of shading and using seawater cooling – in short, exploring emerging ideas of sustainability and flexibility. We also needed to account for future typhoons.

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.

Nobody anticipated the social dimension of lifting the building up

The design enabled the creation of a banking hall right in the centre of the space, lifting everything up so that pedestrians could flow under – that’s been a very enduring aspect of the project and it’s as alive and well today as it was on the drawing board. It invited the community to use it as an urban shortcut, which ended up being a significant bonus.

It’s just wonderful to see, so many decades later, that this is very much part of the community – there’s constant interaction with the people of Hong Kong.

The atrium has been referred to as the ‘cathedral of commerce’ and, in fact, I did look to the UK’s Salisbury Cathedral for inspiration as it has great cross braces, resonant of medieval cross bracing.

An extraordinary, magic moment

Prior to the public unveiling, I stood in the banking hall’s atrium with then-HSBC Chairman Michael Sandberg, who said: “It’s just like the images you showed!”

You can see the renderings, the models, but nothing really prepares you for the real thing – the smell, its tactile qualities – that’s a very special moment.

Everything we did during its development was subject to scrutiny, to auditing and discussion. It was very, very carefully considered, but it was all based on logic. It had to demonstrate that it would deliver significant benefits over what was there before.

It seems like organised mayhem and finally ends up with something pristine, clean and inhabited

When you walk around a building site, you realise that the building is man-made. All that equipment – scooping the dirt, the mud – it’s handcrafted. It takes an army of people.

As a designer, when you revisit a project so many years on, you can’t help but re-evaluate. Of course, there are things you would do differently because the technology of building has moved on in 40 years. You can do things now that you couldn't do then. You could create more transparency, incorporate more insulation, save more energy. But the big picture has endured and will continue to endure over time.