HSBC Main Building
Foster Associates / Norman Foster · Hong Kong, Hong Kong · 1986
HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters is a landmark of high-tech architecture in which structure, circulation and building services are deliberately exposed. Large steel suspension trusses allow office floors to hang from major structural masts, freeing the ground level as a public passage beneath the building. Escalators rise into a tall central atrium, while modular components were fabricated internationally and assembled on the dense Central site. Completed and formally opened in the mid-1980s, the headquarters remains one of Foster’s most important early high-rise works and a defining piece of Hong Kong’s financial district.