Tall & Urban News

Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) has revealed its plans for a 190-meter-tall office tower on the world’s most expensive plot of land – a public car park in Hong Kong snapped up for a record-smashing £2.2 billion (US$2.8 billion).

The 36-story, 43,000 square meter project, which will feature a high-tensile steel structure, replaces the now-flattened 2 Murray Road multistory parking garage in the core of the city’s financial district,

Henderson Land Development, a property company owned by one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest families, bought the 2,880 square meter multistory in 2017 at auction after fending off eight rival bidders.

The eye-watering price tag for the lot, which works out at £750,000 per square meter (US$955,000 per square meter), was way above market expectations, even for an area with one of the highest real estate values in the world.

The prime plot is located near a number of iconic office towers, including IM Pei’s 72-story Bank of China building, Cesar Pelli’s 63-story Cheung Kong Centre, and Foster + Partners’ 1985 Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.

A short walking distance to both Central and Admiralty MTR metro stations, the site was the first commercial land to be sold by Hong Kong’s government in the prime central location since 1996.

Zaha Hadid, who died in 2016, rose to international prominence after winning a design competition for a Hong Kong project in 1983 – a leisure club called The Peak, which was never built.

The Murray Street parking garage was demolished in 2018 and early construction work began on site last year.

For more on this story, go to Architects' Journal.