Building the ‘world’s best bank’

Press, 21 April 1986, Page 12

Building the ‘world’s best bank’

By

Martin Pawley

in Hong Kong for the

‘Guardian/ London.

Right at the heart of Hong Kong’s business district, on an empty site surrounded by oneway streets and giant office blocks, about 50 torn plastic awnings mark the places where Chinese labourers, helped by their wives, are hand-digging the deep pits where the foundations of the new Bank of China will go. Two hundred metres away, even as they dig, the floodlit form of the just-completed Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank prepares to welcome the Governor of the colony and 3000 guests to the opening of the most expensive building in the world. The banks are the shape of tomorrow in Hong Kong, which reverts to the control of Peking in 1997. But today the flags and dragons of colonial rule are having their last spectacular fling. Under the belly of the glistening hi-tech structure of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, their ears filled with the sound of the band of the Coldstream Guards, distinguished white haired ladles and gentlemen ride noiseless escalators to the floors beyond, like first-class travellers departing in a Zeppelin. Elsewhere in the colony, two video-linked racecourses have been taken over to entertain another 25,000 employees of the bank that is synonymous with the economy of Hong Kong. Whether it really is the most expensive building ever built, no one really knows. But it is a fact that architect Norman Foster’s gleaming 50-storey skyscraper cost a cool $lBOO million. That is more than $2400 for every foot of usable floor space inside it —- an average suburban house built to. these standards would cost nearly $3 million. Exactly what the 49-year-old architect will be paid is a closely-guarded secret, but the total bill for professional fees alone will top $3OO million. Foster’s firm is unlikely to walk away with much less than $45 million for six years of work. There is, of course, much more to say about this latest addition to the skyscraper-strewn Hong Kong central district than how much it cost. But to any visitor seeing for the first time

the packed tenements where 90 per cent of the population of the colony live, the price of the hank is the only place to start The most obvious thing that separates this building from its tower block neighbours — several of which are at least as high — is that half its structure is on the outside. Foster’s superbank has what is called “outboard structure.” At one-fifth of the contract cost of the whole building, this “outboard structure" opens up enormous, unobstructed banking and office floors inside. But because it passes in and out of the envelope of the building, its finish is a work of art Not only is the tubular steel corrosion and fireproof, but it is encased in thousands of aluminium body panels painted to the same standard of finish as a Porsche and as closely fitted as a hand-made suit of armour.

The building is literally suspended from this 580-foot steel skeleton in five multi-storey “zones" separated by enormous open spaces doubling as refuge terraces in case of fire. At ground level the entire width of the building is a public plaza with access to the massive overhead banking hall by the escalators. Moving round the building within these zones, which Foster likened to villages in the sky, is also done by escalator. There are 62 in all, as well as 23 glazed express lifts used to reach the zones themselves.

The 10-storey banking atrium, with its one acre of floor space, is lit by a huge system of solar mirrors that reflect down through a well to the plaza below. The bank’s 3800 employees are served by 139 special toilet modules, prefabricated in Japan. The aluminium cladding came from America, the escalators from Germany, the lifts and the steelwork from England, and the miles of hand-railing from New Zealand.

Somehow, 100,000 components from all over the world found their way into the building — and fitted. The bank also boasts 3000 kilometres of electrical and communications wiring. On top is a helipad and four

typhoon-proof maintenance cranes; at the bottom there is the largest circular steel vault door ever machined. Beneath the streets and squares separating the building from Victoria harbour, is a giant tunnel, drawing 900 gallons of sea water a second for the air conditioning system. Because the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank plays the same role in the colony’s finances as the Bank of England does In Britain’s, its computer installation is protected against power failure by two rooms of standby batteries, and four roof-mounted gas turbines. In cost, size, complexity, and sheer technological mastery, the building has no peer anywhere. Least of all in Hong Kong, the world’s fourth largest financial centre, with its own fully computerised stock exchange. The twin 50-storey towers of the exchange — built in Hong Kong as a “total state of the art office technology” — were completed at only a third of the bank’s cost But they have no raised floors to allow unhindered cabling for computers, and* even if they had, the system could not match the revolutionary largemodule aluminium raised floor developed by Foster from the light-weight, high-strength panel systems used in the Boeing 747 airliner.

Foster’s floor not only unites all electrical air-conditioning and sprinkler distribution above slab level, but permits a rapid reorganisation of office space within the building that “state of the art” office managers can only wonder at. Bank projects manager Ray Guy claims the flexibility of layout permitted by the unobstructed floor areas and partitioning system enables the corporation to shift a department from one part of the building to another in four days instead of six to eight weeks. This is vital in a building that houses 60 subsidiary operations in the rapidlyevolving field of electronic banking.

Legend, has it that Foster received only one directive from the bank' director Roy Munden, when he won the architectural competition for the job in 1979 — “build me the best bank in the world.” When the architect got

down to business the only other directive that emerged was, “keep it flexible.” Foster says: "I don’t see how you can separate what a building looks like from how it works and how it is made.”

So he put the two instructions together and took quality and flexibility seriously — not just to achieve "rapid internal reconfiguration” as it is called in the trade, but to the extent of including enough strength to put in another 200,000 square feet of floor space (one third of the present total), and the air-condi-tioning capacity to cool it without having to buy new plant.

Norman Foster’s achievement has been to hold the essentials of his intricate design together for six years so that the building

suspended above the new plaza is still conceptually intact, and still qualitatively different from any other in Hong Kong. He has done this despite a recession that virtually destroyed the local currency, and despite a political crisis that still throws In doubt the value of any investment in the colony after its reunion with the mainland in 1997.

The act of faith that the bank made when it gave what may be its last great commission to an architect based 8000 miles away, who had never built anything taller than three storeys in his life, has been amply rewarded. Despite its cost of six billion Hong Kong dollars, Norman Foster’s bank Is a bench-mark in architectural history.