The Quayside by CL3 Architects: 2020 Best of Year Winner for Environmental Impact
Parks cover nearly 40 percent of the land in Hong Kong, but you’d never know it from the concrete jungle of Kowloon East.
The Quayside, a sustainable, mixed-use, high-rise development beside a highway, brings some much-needed fresh air to the industrial neighborhood. That’s especially true of CL3 Architects’s biophilic
design for the building’s 884,000-square-foot, four-level podium, which centers around a pair of massive green columns that visually connect various public areas. Comprising umbrella plants and philodendrons encircled by copper-finished stainless-steel ribbons inspired by tree rings, the lush pillars spiral upward from the ground-floor lobby (where a layered plywood reception desk forms the base of one trunk), extend through two retail floors, and end at a garden terrace with a kinetic jogging path that generates electricity. Integrated LEDs and built-in irrigation systems fed partly by rainwater keep the columns verdant. Extensive glazing ensures the double-height lobby and other public spaces are bright and airy; an interior brise-soleil of extruded aluminum controls solar heat. With sophisticated air filtration systems and all those pollutant-reducing plants, the Quayside offers 2020’s hottest amenity: a safe place to breathe.
Project Team: William Lim; Clinton Tsoi; Howard Man.
> See the full list of winners and honorees from Best of Year 2020
