It may not be the biggest or the highest skyscraper in the city, but it’s arguably the most extraordinary. The address, Queen’s Central One has been the headquarters of HSBC since 1865 and the banks growth has seen it eat its way through four buildings over its lifetime.
The current building is a Norman Foster construction built in 1986, when, with a price tag of HK$5 billion, it was the most expensive building in the world.
The building has no central core and is actually made up of modules suspended from central V sections. The lego-like construction gave rise to rumours that that HSBC was unconvinced by the impending 1999 handover of Hong Kong from Britian to China and constructed a building that could be taken apart and shipped back to the UK. This legend has taken on an almost mythical status in Hong Kong but is nevertheless untrue. The modular design was used because of the central location of the building and short time. The bank wanted the work completed as quickly as possible but because of noise restrictions in central, couldn’t have worked overnight in the city. Instead, they had the modules built around the world and then shipped them to Hong Kong and hung them on the building.
