BANK OF CHINA TOWER

Designed by I.M.Pei and Partners; completed 1989 Hong Kong
Notable for its place in the late-20th-century skyline of Hong Kong, the Bank of China
Tower, the headquarters of the Bank in Hong Kong designed by I.M.Pei and Partners and
completed in 1989, is located two blocks away from the old bank building in central
Hong Kong island. Surrounded by major roads on three sides, the tower rises from a
square footprint placed at the center of the small two-acre trapezoidal site. Measuring
1,209 feet to the tip of the twin masts in 70 stories, the tower was the tallest structure
outside the United States at completion.
The building is acclaimed for its elegant form and structural ingenuity. The tower can
be divided into two parts: the curtain-walled shaft resting on a three-story granite-clad
base. The base, with a castellated top, is designed to give the building visual protection
from the chaotic surrounding of major roadways. The allusion to an ancient Chinese city
wall in the design of the base is unmistakable. As the site slopes up from north to south,
the base absorbs the slope and provides the building with two entrances at different
levels. The northern entrance has an arched opening that leads into a barrel-vaulted lobby
where elevator banks are placed for access to the office tower. The southern entrance at
the upper level leads into the banking hall. Located right above the base, the hall is
surrounded on three sides by a floor-to-ceiling curtain wall screened with heavy vertical
mullions. This screen wall, decorated with a diagonally placed squares motif used in
Pei’s Fragrance Hill Hotel in Beijing, helps to make the transition from the heavy base to
the light curtain-walled tower. Above the information counter in the hall is a 14-story
square atrium that brings daylight into the center of the hall. However, because of the
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narrowness of the atrium, very little light manages to filter into the hall. Around the
atrium are the offices for the bank, and above these floors are speculative offices. The
boardroom for the bank is located at the apex of the tower under sloped glass roofs
supported by massive steel trusses.
Although the building is set back from Victoria harbor by a block, its shimmering
facade never fails to attract attention from across the water, the principal vantage point of
the famed Hong Kong skyline. This is due entirely to the elegant form of the building.
The tower is made up of a square shaft cut by the two diagonals into four triangular
segments. Each segment terminates at a different height with a large sloping roof. The
effect is said by Pei to be like bundling four sticks of different heights together,
symbolizing rising bamboo stalks with its auspicious connotation in Chinese culture. The
form of the building is said to be the result of a long search by Pei for an appropriate
form for a late-20th-century skyscraper. Dissatisfied with the conventional rectangular
tower of the International Style and the neo-classical pastiche of Postmodernism, Pei
attempts to seek a new form in the Bank of China Tower that is structurally honest and
innovative while aesthetically genuine to its region. Because of the diagonal cut, the
building contains six facades tapering toward the tip, each face covered with silvercoated
reflective glass that catches light from different directions at different times of the
day, resulting in a glittering appearance.
Pei’s tower is similarly important for its structural inventiveness. Designed in
collaboration with Leslie E.Robertson, the main structure consists of four corner
composite columns of reinforced concrete that carry the building load to the ground. In
addition, a central column to support the four segments of the tower is placed between the
top of the building to the 25th floor, at which point the load is transferred to the corners.
The five-column tower is reminiscent of ancient Chinese pagoda forms with a heavy
central column and four supporting corner columns. It is at these corners that both
vertical and lateral loads meet and where vertical, horizontal, and diagonal steel members
meet in the encasing reinforced-concrete columns. Designed to withstand the severe
typhoon winds of Hong Kong, the structural frame was conceived by Robertson as a huge
three-dimensional space frame, a structural solution that is extremely efficient and less
costly than a conventional structural steel frame. In order to express the structure on the
facade, Pei first proposed a curtain-wall system that accentuated the structural frame,
resulting in a series of crosses on the elevations. This proposal was not accepted by the
client, who feared that the crosses might carry negative associations. Pei then modified
the design to recess the horizontal elements of the bracing system and turn them into
steel. This design, explained by Pei as a series of diamonds, seamlessly integrates the
structure with aesthetics.
The meaning of the building’s form has been a subject of intense
speculation in Hong Kong society. The four triangular shafts of the building resulted in sharp corners. According to the principles and beliefs of
feng s hui, the ancient Chinese art of reading the house form for auspicious or bad influences, these
edges are regarded as exerting malignant forces on the occupants of facing buildings.
Thus, the building is said to have a negative impact on neighboring buildings. For feng shui
masters, the corners are like sharp knife blades, and devices must be placed in
surrounding buildings, including the Government House (the residence and office of the
colonial Governor of Hong Kong), to ward off negative influences coming from the
tower.
The taller and more elegant Bank of China Tower has always been compared to the
Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank Headquarters by Norman Foster. However, what Pei has
ultimately achieved in the tower, his last skyscraper, is a modernist statement of
structural integrity and honesty of expression in a multifaceted sculptural form. The
tower remains one of the most prominent landmarks in Hong Kong’s skyline and
represents an innovation in skyscraper form, a key building type in 20th-century urban
architecture.