Inside Hong Kong’s daring new twin condominium towers, The Legacy

Hong Kong would not do subtlety. However at 8 Fort Street, the place The Legacy’s twin residential towers have simply risen 198m above Mid-Ranges West, ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel has delivered one thing sudden: monumentality with restraint, density with respiratory room.

When Citterio and Viel first visited the positioning within the mid-2010s, they noticed fragmentation – a steep hillside scattered with looming buildings dealing with each which approach. ‘The thought of making two rigorously designed towers was meant to deliver a way of order,’ Citterio explains. That rigour manifests in an uneven composition of two glass-and-bronze volumes that rise like mismatched wings from a single stone podium, their orientation choreographed to maximise views, air flow, and privateness.

Discover The Legacy by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel

Viel is emphatic concerning the towers’ twin façades. ‘We designed each the bay-facing and hill-facing façades to be distinctive, treating them each as refined frontages.’ It’s a pointed riposte to a metropolis the place buildings typically current one formidable face to the harbour and shrug at every thing else.

The façades’ reflective darkish gray glazing – chosen for thermal efficiency – reads as unexpectedly urbane. ‘It is clearly not an workplace constructing, because the balconies specific its residential character,’ Viel notes, ‘but it stays very totally different from another residential tower.’ These balconies are operable components in a climate-responsive envelope engineered to face up to typhoons whereas permitting pure air flow. Nook home windows, achieved by means of what Citterio describes as ‘a really advanced structural train’, eradicate vertical mullions fully, providing unobstructed panoramas.

Beneath, the rostrum is clad in Aspen white granite reduce with deep articulation, a nod to the retaining partitions which have traditionally anchored Hong Kong’s bristling hillside growth. ‘Over time, because of the impact of the native setting, the rostrum will tackle a rock-like high quality,’ Citterio observes, imagining a constructing that ages into its context moderately than towards it.

Arrival sequences matter in a metropolis the place merely getting dwelling can really feel like an ordeal. Right here, The Legacy’s design separates vehicular entry from pedestrian entry throughout 5 distinct factors on Fort Street and Seymour Street. Panorama design by Parcnouveau reinforces this city generosity, creating what Viel calls ‘a brand new high quality to city context during which the towers join with town moderately than merely touchdown on the bottom’.

By all accounts, the builders – Henderson Land and New World Growth – tapped ACPV Architects partly for its European fluency in mixing hospitality sensibilities with residential programming, then nonetheless novel in Hong Kong.

Ten years on, that foresight proves prescient in its intersection of social and architectural nuances. As Citterio notes, ‘These large-scale buildings are like small cities, and I hope that the shared areas assist create a way of group and solidarity amongst individuals.’

In a metropolis as dense and, paradoxically, introverted as Hong Kong, that ambition is perhaps The Legacy’s most radical proposition.