Taikoo Place by King Charles Street Quad by Gustafson Porter + Bowman and Urbis Limited

Hong Kong / Built in 2024 /
gp-b.com

Introduction

Taikoo Place is an inclusive open space designed to promote biodiversity and raise public awareness of Hong Kong’s heritage of Feng Shui woodlands.

Taikoo Place, one of Hong Kong’s most prominent business hubs, features a public open space with lush native vegetation and sculptural water features as part of a major urban transformation project around two new high specification office towers.

Our 2.3ha landscape masterplan vision, its design and attention to detail, has significantly enhanced the public realm and overall experience for office workers and wider community. It consists of a sequence of gardens and squares ranging from small intimate places around water to gather with friends and colleagues, to active street promenades suitable for cultural events, concerts and outdoor markets.

Concept

The brief was to design and develop a central garden plaza and the surrounding public realm for Swire Properties Limited that would not only showcase their headquarters but be a welcoming space for the general public.

The concept ‘Transition, Tradition and Transparency’ was conceived as a contemporary reinterpretation of the landscape that surrounds the city of Hong Kong with its geological nature and the City’s cultural refinement observed through a history of high-quality craftsmanship. This also tells the history of the client’s shipping business across water and their urban legacy in terms of waterfront urban development and social value for the community. The entire outdoor experience at Taikoo Place is designed to be a place of discovery and destination.

The brief evolved and was extended to include the new building lobby for the first tower of the development, another garden entrance for a second tower and all the adjacent streetscapes. This unification of a lush biodiverse landscape and building lobbies was achieved by creating large bands of brown and white granite running through the site. Taikoo Place embodies a holistic approach, delivering a high-quality public realm which carries its unique aesthetics across Taikoo Square, Taikoo Gardens and into the surrounding streetscape with a continuous design that prioritises pedestrians and urban activation.

Taikoo Square creates a series of terraces and is defined by two large longitudinal pools connected by a cascade and a small water table that references the history of Quarry Bay as a working dock. Taikoo Gardens is a calm and quiet space featuring an interactive water table for contemplation and relaxation.

The Design

Taikoo Place creates an inclusive open space with lush vegetation and sculptural water features. Its development follows the demolition of two existing towers, signalling the commitment from Swire Properties to creating an engaging open space for residents and office tenants alike.
Taikoo Square is the starting point in the creation of a unique immersive urban forest experience. Through transition and transparency, glimpses of layered landscape spaces invite people to explore and experience the space. Universal access is provided through the linearity of the spaces which are accentuated through bands of stonework connecting and extending directly into the lobby of the first tower. Throughout this pedestrian itineraries people have a variety of opportunities for siting, relaxing, mingling with colleagues, friends or having lunch.

Through the refinement, carving and sculpting of the stonework long narrow water features hint at the long history of craft and refinement of the region. Each water feature with its rounded edges, patterning and texturing performs in special ways, bringing movement, sound, contemplation, interaction and environmental comfort within each space. To achieve this, the design of the stonework used digital modelling to create the complex shapes and surface textures. This allowed the contractor to analyse and manufacture the stone in the most economical way and minimize wastage.

To achieve the vision of a lush planting scheme over the project’s underground car park, innovative solutions were implemented. Structural loads were designed to sustain large areas of soil under the finished levels of the proposed squares and gardens. Deep soil corridors were created to extend underneath the footpaths connecting planters on either side, thus maximizing both soil volume and underground connectivity of the mycorrhizal fungi network.
This holistic design approach extends across the rest of the site into the calm character of Taikoo Gardens and the streetscape areas which are activated with cafes and restaurant spill out areas.

Biodiversity and Sustainability

Taikoo Place is a nature-based project promoting biodiversity, biophilia and wellbeing. We wanted Taikoo Square to be part of strategic blue and green connections between the mountains and the sea, and to bring the native vegetation of Hong Kong back into the urban fabric.

To promote biodiversity, most of the trees planted are native species grown in a specialist nursery. Urbis, our local landscape architects and their approach to early tree procurement and native planting was very important.

Feng Shui woodlands are remnants of native woodlands which were protected from agricultural clearance due to their spiritual significance. Today, only 116 of these woodlands remain, mainly in rural villages in the New Territories which are hotspots of biodiversity. At Taikoo Place, these remnant species have found a new home and are re-introducing biodiversity by creating structural diversity within the planting. This was achieved by underplanting trees with open shrubs, ferns, grasses and perennials, creating a layered vegetation character to encourage flowering and set seeds or bear berries for wildlife. Also, the lighting was designed specifically to minimize disturbance to wildlife.

However, the focus is not just for the benefit of the plant and animal kingdom but for humans too. The main challenge that urban designers in Hong Kong are facing is the need to promote health, well-being and happiness of the citizens to create a truly liveable city. Biodiversity and biophilia have vitally important roles to play in addressing this challenge. Taikoo Place embodies the approach of encouraging the emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms. Its biophilic design will facilitate the reconnection of the urban population with nature and other living beings.

Taikoo Place is an exemplary project. It has adopted numerous, comprehensive and cross-disciplinary sustainable design practices that have led to securing the highest grading in several sustainability assessment tools including BEAM plus, LEED and WELL.

The Brief, Challenges and Impact

The Taikoo Place landscape design greatly enhances the existing site with two towers that were built to the highest standards of building sustainability targeting LEED platinum rating. Supporting this, great care was taken in the selection of materials focusing on their durability, life cycle and aesthetics with a high standard on detailing.

The client aspirations from the beginning were to build an open and vibrant mixed-use community that would reshape the city’s office landscape, elevating Taikoo Place not only to a world-class commercial hub status but also provide an attractive alternative to Hong Kong Central.

The project has had a maximum impact on human interaction and social regeneration. A very active agenda of events and activities is in place throughout the year to boost culture and to integrate the local community. Taikoo Place is a very active place in the evenings with an attractive food and beverage offer in a great setting enhanced by a holistic lighting design across the whole site.

This project has succeeded in overcoming one of the main challenges that urban designers face in Hong Kong – to create a truly liveable place, promoting health, wellbeing and happiness of the citizens by encouraging biodiversity and adopting a biophilic design to encourage the reconnection with nature.

Professional Collaboration

Every successful project is the result of close collaboration between different design disciplines. The client’s vision was key to assemble a team of talented consultants, all experts in their own fields, who collaborated very closely from the outset of the project. Equal importance in a complex project like this was the successful collaboration between the consultant team and the contractors during the construction phase. It was especially important in the realisation of our sculptural designs for the stone water features.

Throughout the project Gustafson Porter + Bowman and URBIS, our local landscape architect collaborator, collaborated very closely to ensure that the project was proceeding in accordance with the design intent and client aspirations. There were big challenges due to building an ambitious landscape project above an underground car park. Thus, it required a multi-disciplinary approach not only to assess potential risks but find innovative design solutions.

URBIS was also key to understanding the nature of Hong Kong and its unique ecology. URBIS’ desire for biodiverse planting led them to introduce local Feng Shui Woodlands into the landscape design. It was agreed that the re-introduction of Feng Shui trees to the centre of Hong Kong would be good for biodiversity and thus good for people. URBIS was actively involved in the early procurement of the planting and tree selection and were instrumental during the construction stage to inspect the works and coordinate the quality of the construction with the contractor.

This professional collaboration, not only with our local counterpart, but also with the rest of an outstanding team, our close client relationship and their great vision has made this project a true realisation of the values and qualities that landscape can contribute to the built environment of our dense cities.