The office tower on 39 King’s Road started as a façade exercise soon evolving into a full architectural design mission. Antithesis of any “iconic” approach, it elaborates on the idea of “quiet innovation”, a motto developed with façade consultant VS-A, emphasizing the improvement of simple, archetypal solutions. As it would have been climatically criminal to implement a glass façade in Hong Kong considering the fully exposed to east and south facades, we ended up designing a solid façade perforated by a hyper-repetitive pattern of small windows, somehow echoing its immediate surrounding. The result is humble, pragmatic and blends in the dense urban fabric of the North Point area.
The façade is made of pre-assembled repetitive panels entirely built in recycled aluminium. Made-out of multiple layers, its outer one takes advantage of the material and its shape-forming process to present an extruded corrugated profile. This profile, besides reinforcing the vertical and industrial language of the façade also creates light and shadows variations during the day. But most importantly, by increasing the area of the outer layer versus the inner one, it radiates accumulated heat towards outside hence reducing the need in terms of interior climate control. This effect is reinforced by the ventilated cavity right behind the corrugated layer and the integration of ventilation slots regularly distributed along the height of the building.
One of the key gestures of the 39 King’s Road Tower lies in the extreme repetition of its façade components according to a very strict grid. This strategy answers to both the will to plastically anchor the building in its context and the desire to experiment with standardisation. In the end, only one window type ended up being built while the complementary solid parts were limited to a handful of them. This approach reduces complexity and cost but also allows for complete flexibility when it comes to the interior configurations, every floor being divisible in a systematic way. The vertical shaft and the ground floor treatment answers to the general material logic by implementing tiles, another typical Hong Kong material used for façade. Text description by the architects | Visit www.theradicalproject.com to read more about the project.
