Reviewed by Jason Carlow

The building is the result of an international competition held in 2007 and is Zaha Hadid Architects’s first building in Hong Kong – coming thirty years after Hadid’s famous competition design for the Hong Kong Peak Leisure Club in 1983.

Zaha Hadid Architects’ (ZHA) Jockey Club Innovation Tower is perched at the edge of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HKPU) campus in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The newly completed building is the result of an international competition held in 2007 and is ZHA’s first building in Hong Kong – coming thirty years after Hadid’s famous competition design for the Hong Kong Peak Leisure Club in 1983. While the practice has grown over the past three decades into a global brand, with numerous complex projects reaching completion or in conception, Innovation Tower is closely linked in authorship to its early Peak design in its ongoing exploration of dynamic movement through architectural form.

The skewed form of the building heaves over its entrance point

Throughout the competition process, HKPU utilised the opportunity of a campus expansion to put design at the forefront of its agenda. The choice of ZHA’s seductive competition drawings provided the university with exactly what it was looking for: a globally iconic new home to promote its School of Design. The university identified an awkwardly shaped building site, nestled between athletic facilities and an elevated highway, as the project’s location; the choice of site, however, was a strategic one as it would facilitate a link to a new campus expansion across the highspeed roadways that encircle the campus.

ZHA’s tower leans dramatically towards the adjacent highway, buffering the campus from the roadway while simultaneously capturing the essence of speed from the flow of traffic beyond....Continue Reading

Top image: Night view, showing the building in its relatively low-rise context

All images © Virgile S. Bertrand

> via The Australian Design Review