Architecture

Maxim’s Headquarter

Kowloon, Hong Kong  |  2015

 

2016  |  Asia Pacific Property Award  Five Stars Award


ARK was comissioned by Hong Kong Maxim’s Group in 2011 to be the Architect for an office headquarter at Cheung Sa Wan, Hong Kong.

Maxim’s is one of the leading food and beverage company with numerous restaurant and bakeries chains in the city of Hong Kong. The project goal is to design a new headquarter with 18,000 sqm floor space for Maxims to house their various programmes in terms of general office space, executive floor, training centers, conferences centers, staff facilities and a public face with Maxim’s own restaurant chains.

This 27-storey grade A office tower is located at an infill site of former maxims food factory facing Cheung Shun Street in Cheung Sa Wan. The podium, conceived as the “Public Zone”, engages the street with a 3-storey high glass wall revealing the entrance lobby atrium behind, forming a show window between the public and commercial sector. The typical office floors are designed to maximise daylight and seaview. The long span post tensioning structures allow greatest flexibility in office planning. 

The design aims to find a new expression of high rise office tower in 21st century that can expresses the corporate culture of Maxim’s which is grounded in tradition while forward thinking at the same time. The building form is basically a generic rectangular volume with rounded corners to express the continuation of surface and space. With detail manipulation of cutting and pushing, the façade is modulated to give the building a slow motion of dynamic movement.

The curtain wall water droplet mullion feature is conceptualized as a continuation of folding glass surface. The feature profile allows the building to be transparent and solid when viewed from different perspectives. At night, façade lighting washes the mullion feature as well as enhancing the dynamic building form with a more theatrical/ dramatic expression. 

The podium continues the dynamic motion gesture with curved glass wall that indents from the street to form the building entrance with a ribbon like cantilever glass canopy hung above the street