A systems approach to conceptual design solutions for a very tall building in Hong Kong

Abstract

The thesis represents a design investigation that seeks to reconsider the high-rise building. With changing uses and technologies, high-rise office towers may have become obsolete. Given the recent capabilities for communications networking, the need for businesses to occupy exclusive-use buildings in central city locations may be questioned. Instead the mixed use building type, often encountered in Southeast Asia, may point at a way of rethinking the typology of tall buildings as such. When taken to an extreme, mixed-use buildings could include use and occupation patterns as comprehensive as cities themselves. These would need to be supported by a skeletal structure of building systems that would include structural, transportation, service, climate control and inhabitation systems. Amongst designers and engineers there exists much discussion about building 'super tall buildings'. Yet there may be a need for departing from the current type of central-core high-rise buildings. In this light the thesis proposes conceptual solutions for building systems that may provide for sustaining more than 122,000 people. The idea is based on the concept of a triangulated mega-frame structure of roughly 49,700 sqm footprint that rises at a 1:5 aspect ratio to 1560m of height. The building is organized hierarchically in components of varying sizes. Interspersed between habitable modules are lobbies and spaces that act much like public places of a city. The basic module is an adaptable and suspended eight-story unit (pod). Clusters of 30 such pods, connected in pairs by common atria, form one planning unit of 242 m height. This unit is serviced by a centrally suspended structure which acts much as a public plaza/square. Five + of these planning units rise to make up the building. Woven into this assembly of modules, lobbies and plazas are vertical and horizontal connections, like streets. These again are hierarchically organized to provide for movement at different speeds and distances, much like horizontal streets or rail networks. The result is a building that provides an intense concentration of resources and delivers a degree of control, connectivity and adaptability that could suggest an alternative form of thinking about growing cities under such dense urban conditions as are prevalent in Hong Kong.