With the developer's brief of setting a target size of 3,000 square feet per residential unit, the architects embarked on this now characteristically narrow and single tower design.
The design allows for 2 units per floor on what was described as a very tight building site.
Because of the height of the building and future maintenance concerns, screw-on metal
cladding and glass curtain walling has been used in this project.
While building damper systems have been applied to minimise building movements in Japan, they are typically computer controlled - at Highcliff, the project team decided on a passive and maintenance-free system.
The damper system is the first of its kind for a residential building anywhere in the world.
Experiments have shown that the damper system is capable of reducing movements from eight seconds each to just 4.7 seconds, making for a significant difference in residents’ comfort - by the time someone notices any movement it has stopped.
The inclusion of such a damper system is mainly due to typhoons that plague the region -usually in the late summer and where winds can gust up to 100 mph not to mention sudden changes in wind direction as well as wind shear.
Elevators to the residential units do not feature a typical high-zone/low-zone configuration as the project team felt it was unnecessary in this setting.
In this design, there is purposely no readily identifiable rear to the tower which makes a difference to residents living in the other adjacent buildings - located as they are in one of Hong Kong's premier high-income districts.
existing [completed]
residential