How Norman Foster sees his HSBC Building 40 years after the Hong Kong icon was born
Foster says the bold strategic design decisions he made for the HSBC Main Building four decades ago are just as valid today
Norman Foster is in high spirits as he strolls into a meeting room on the 15th floor of the HSBC Main Building on Hong Kong’s Queen’s Road Central.
Flying into the city the previous evening, the 90-year-old British architect is in town to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a project that catapulted his firm from small-scale UK residences to global skyscrapers, airports and stadiums.
In 1979, Foster and Partners won an international competition to design the fourth iteration of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation’s headquarters in Hong Kong. Since then, the firm has been back for major projects including the Hong Kong International Airport and the West Kowloon Cultural District.
“The scale of the city has so changed. But the bank? It is remarkably unchanged. It has weathered 40 years,” Foster says.
“Hong Kong as a place – the street life, the traders, the diversity – it still has that can-do attitude,” he adds. “For me, it’s incredibly refreshing and stimulating to come here.”
The original brief – to build no less than the best bank building in the world – allowed Foster and his team the opportunity to implement a number of radical ideas. The result was the first skyscraper to realise the utopian aspirations suggested by British architect Peter Cook and the influential Archigram architectural group he co-founded in the 1960s.