Hong Kong’s Game-Changing Groundscraper

Video hosted by Fred Mills. This video contains paid promotion for Central Site 3.

WHAT would happen if you took all 380 metres of the Empire State Building, and laid it down flat?

You’d end up with a building that’s only a few storeys high, but 380 metres wide, spreading its surface area out into the surrounding area instead of into the sky.

Now, you might be thinking that New York City is the worst place imaginable to run this experiment. It’s got far too many skyscrapers for a 380-metre-wide building to fit in anywhere.

But New York is actually only third on the list of cities with the most skyscrapers. The number one spot goes to Hong Kong, one of the world's most global cities.

For the last seventy years, the guiding philosophy when it comes to construction there has been ‘build often and build tall’.

Above: Aerial render of Central Yards in Hong Kong. Credit: Central Site 3.

But now a new $8BN proposed development is ready to challenge the status quo.

Central Yards is 1.6 million square feet of office, retail, and green space. At 400-metres wide, this groundscraper will act as a bridge between Hong Kong Island’s harbourfront and its bustling inner neighbourhoods.

But what exactly is a groundscraper?  

Building Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s growth in the second half of the twentieth century is the sort of success story most places can only dream of.

For hundreds of years, it’s been an important trade port for goods flowing between Asia and Europe.

But it was a massive population influx in the 1950s that sowed the seeds for it to become the worldwide manufacturing hub and global influence we see today.

The 1950s was also when the government established a strict policy of building up rather than out.

Not only is the region fairly small, it’s extremely mountainous with precious little flat land suitable for construction. So what’s available has to be used very carefully.

Whether it’s for housing, retail or business, the default for Hong Kong has been to build as vertically as possible. That’s why they’ve got 569 skyscrapers, more than any other city.

This construction philosophy continued well into the 21st century, as Hong Kong solidified its leading position not just in manufacturing but as an important node in the global financial market. What’s more, it’s had the highest life expectancy in the entire world since 2010.

If you’re not familiar with the layout of Hong Kong, it’s made up of three areas: Hong Kong Island, Kowloon and The New Territories.

Above: Map of the districts of Hong Kong.

Most of its skyscrapers are concentrated on Hong Kong Island’s northern shoreline and Kowloon’s southern shoreline, with both clusters facing each other across the Victoria Harbour.

But the main nerve centre for the entire city is Hong Kong Island’s Central District.

This is its Zone 1, its Manhattan, the area which plays host to international company headquarters, diplomatic consulates and critical government infrastructure.

Like the rest of the city, it’s dominated by the skyscrapers which have defined Hong Kong’s reputation for generations.

Its tallest is Tower 2 of the International Finance Center, or 2 IFC for short. It’s currently the eighth-tallest office building in the world.

It’s also a stark reminder of how expensive it is to build anything in Hong Kong. Just the land for it alone cost its developers a record-setting 30BN Hong Kong dollars, or about $5.3BN in American dollars today.

A pretty big incentive to use as little groundspace as possible for whatever you’re building.

Hong Kong might be an extreme case but it represents a building philosophy that’s subscribed to by most of the world’s biggest cities.

Above: Hong Kong at night.

When it comes to new buildings right in your central district, skyscrapers are the obvious way to go. Until now.

Enter the Groundscraper

Let’s think back to that Empire State Building which we left on its side.

That, give or take nineteen metres, is the size of Central Yards. But why build this way?

Well, in general, you can build a groundscraper a lot faster than would be possible with a skyscraper.

The top being much nearer to the ground means it’s also easier to control the temperature throughout the building, and you can use less energy to do it.

Plus, one of the big drawbacks with skyscrapers is that wherever you build them, they’re going to block somebody’s picturesque skyline view. Several cities around the world have even gone as far as to bring in laws which ban construction of any building that would block specific sightlines.

The most famous example is probably London’s thirteen protected sightlines for St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Hong Kong has its own similar set of rules. It has seven Strategic Viewing Points dotted around the city. Anyone who wants to build a skyscraper here has to prove that it maintains a twenty to thirty percent “building free zone” below the ridgelines of those iconic hills.

Then there’s one more Viewing Point looking down from Victoria Peak into Victoria Harbour, and it’s the same story. If your skyscraper can’t guarantee that twenty to thirty percent gap to preserve that sightline, it’s not getting built.

So one of the easiest way to ensure that your planning application won’t run afoul of those viewing point rules is to keep your height low. Another job for the groundscraper.

Hong Kong is far from the first place to build one, of course. The soon to be open Google headquarters in London and Apple Park in California are two other prominent examples.

The Pentagon is another. It’s one of the largest office buildings in the world despite being only five storeys high.

But those are two tech giant headquarters and a highly secure government building. While they’re all very impressive structures, they don’t integrate the most naturally into their surrounding environments.

The goal of the network of designers and architects behind Hong Kong Island’s first groundscraper is to encourage a kind of mixed-use development which the city hasn’t traditionally prioritised, especially not on Hong Kong Island’s northern shoreline.

This is somewhere offices, retail, public green space, and even an underground theatre with 1,100 seats can all co-exist in one place. A city within a city.

But why make the centrepiece of all this a groundscraper instead of building skyscraper number 570?

What Makes Central Yards Different?

Earlier we mentioned that one of the main criticisms of skyscrapers is that they can potentially block views.

Central Yards is going to be built on Hong Kong Island, right next to Victoria Harbour.

Above: Render of Central Yards.

By building wide instead of high, developers can preserve those vistas both for people coming in on the ferry and for people looking out onto the harbour from the island.

Which is important, because the second reason is that Central Yards will act as a bridge between the harbourfront and the rest of Hong Kong Island. It’s a more open, welcoming and integrated structure than another tower would be.

We’ve seen developments like this before, of course. Cities reinvigorate their waterfront areas all the time by building multi-purpose destinations for tourists and locals alike.

What sets Central Yards apart from them is how it affects not just the area being built on, but the entire district, and even the entire city.

Central Yards is aiming to unveil its first phase in a grand opening late next year.

The total square footage is currently set to be over 1.6 million square feet. That’s a bigger footprint than the US Capitol Building.

850,000 square feet is set aside for retail, including five major duplexes, while 670,000 is reserved for some of the most expensive office space in the city.

300,000 square feet of it will be green space, including Central District’s largest sky garden with 400 trees and 280 plant species. That’s going to be 300 metres long at over 160,000 square feet, which would also put it in the top five largest sky gardens in the world.

So, it goes without saying that sustainability is a key focus here.

The windows are specially engineered to let in as much fresh air and daylight as possible, and the whole building is keeping its energy usage low with a seawater cooling system. Another thing that would be much harder to do with a skyscraper.

Next, we need to head underground to catch a show.

Contained within Central Yards is Hong Kong’s first ever Broadway-calibre theatre, with a capacity of 1,100 and a futuristic light wall on the front capable of showing whatever you like.

The first sixteen rows can be removed to transform it into a gala dinner space, served by a kitchen that’s over 2,000 square feet.

That’s about the size of a four-bedroom house dedicated just to making dinner.

And if we zoom back out for a second, there’s a semi-open event space alongside it which can be used for the sort of events which would really benefit from the Hong Kong backdrop.

Walking the length of Central Yards would be like walking from the bottom of the Empire State Building to the top and then going even further.

That’s an incredibly ambitious project. But Hong Kong is a city literally built on that kind of ambition. It’s what made it one of the most important places in the world.

It just turns out that its future might be a little closer to earth than a lot of us were expecting.

Additional footage and images: Central Yards.

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