Walk a few blocks of Central and you are, quite literally, surrounded by the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ most celebrated architects — Foster, Pei, Herzog & de Meuron, Hadid — each with a landmark within sight of the next. Norman Foster’s HSBC headquarters (1985) hangs its floors from external masts; I. M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower (1990) cuts the skyline into triangles of glass; Herzog & de Meuron’s Tai Kwun (2018) knits new galleries into the old Central Police Station; and Zaha Hadid Architects’ The Henderson (2024) curves where everything around it is straight.
The Henderson is the newest and the strangest — its form drawn from the bud of the bauhinia, the flower on Hong Kong’s flag, wrapped in a façade of thousands of individually curved glass panels. Beside the boxes of Central, it looks like something that grew rather than was built.
But the story everyone tells is about feng shui. When Pei’s Bank of China Tower went up, its sharp, blade-like angles were read as sending hostile energy at its neighbours — including the HSBC building. HSBC’s reply has become legend: two window-cleaning cranes on its roof, shaped unmistakably like cannons, aimed straight back at the Bank of China. Whether you believe a word of it or not, it tells you something true about the city — that in the most money-minded place on earth, the oldest ideas about luck still shape the newest towers.