Anyone who’s ever been to Hong Kong will tell you that the island isn’t short of skyscrapers, especially in the bristling concrete canyons along the shorelines of Victoria Harbour. It says something, then, that ZHA's (Zaha Hadid Architects) new tower on Murray Road for the Henderson Land Group has made even jaded locals sit up and pay attention.
For starters, as addresses go, The Henderson is in good company – IM Pei’s monumental Bank of China, Norman Foster’s HSBC tower and Paul Rudolph’s Lippo Centre are practically an arm’s length away. But what makes the 190m-high, 36-storey tower stand apart is its unusual fluted façade of curved, glass columns, a design, say the architects, that ‘reinterprets the structural forms and layering of a Bauhinia bud – which appears on Hong Kong’s flag – about to blossom’.
