Skyscrapers in Hong Kong
No city has more tall buildings. Hong Kong counts roughly 550 to 570 at 150 meters or above, and more than 2,500 once the bar drops to 100 meters, because only about a quarter of the territory can be built on at all.
How many there are
At the 150 meter threshold that the Council on Vertical Urbanism uses for its city rankings, Hong Kong has about 550 to 570 completed buildings and holds first place. Shenzhen is second, within a few dozen and closing fast on the strength of a building program that barely existed in 1990. New York is third, somewhere between 320 and 430 depending on the cutoff date, well behind both. Drop the bar to 100 meters and Hong Kong passes 2,500 buildings, a figure no other city approaches.
Those numbers move around because the question hides three different ones. Count everything a resident would call a high-rise and the total is near 9,000. Count 100 meters and up and it is in the thousands. At 150 meters, the architectural standard, it is in the hundreds. A headline saying "8,000 skyscrapers" and one saying "569 skyscrapers" can both be right about the same city, so check the threshold before comparing cities.
Why Hong Kong grew upward
Hong Kong has 1,100 square kilometers of land and about 7.5 million people, but only around a quarter of that land carries buildings. The rest is steep hillside and the 24 country parks and 22 special areas that cover close to 40 percent of the territory and are protected from development. A population the size of Switzerland's lives on that quarter, so the floor space had to come from height.
How the land is sold sharpens the pressure. The government owns almost all of it and sells leases, releasing sites at a pace it controls. Land premiums are among the largest items in public revenue, so a developer who has paid for a plot in Central has every reason to put the maximum permitted floor area on it and go up. Hong Kong also sits far enough from an active fault that earthquake loads do not drive the design the way they do in Tokyo or Taipei. Wind does.
The tallest and the best known
The International Commerce Centre in West Kowloon is the tallest at 484 m and 108 floors, finished in 2010 by Kohn Pedersen Fox. The Ritz-Carlton occupies its top floors with a hotel lobby at the 103rd, and the Sky100 observation deck sits at the 100th. Across Victoria Harbour, Cesar Pelli's Two International Finance Centre reaches 412 m and 88 floors, finished in 2003 on reclaimed land at the harbor edge.
Central Plaza in Wan Chai, 374 m and 78 floors from 1992, was the tallest building in Asia when it opened and has a triangular floor plate and a neon mast that tells the time by color. The Center, 346 m from 1998, is one of the few all-steel towers in a city that builds in concrete.
The architecturally famous one is shorter. I. M. Pei's Bank of China Tower, 367 m and 70 floors, opened in 1990 with a frame of triangulated steel trusses that carry the wind load down to four corner columns, so it needs far less steel than a conventional tower of its height. The result is the stack of sliced prisms that reads as the skyline's signature from any distance, and its standing among the world's famous skyscrapers rests on that frame.
Where they stand, and who lives in them
The famous view is a strip. Central, Admiralty and Wan Chai on the north shore of Hong Kong Island, with Tsim Sha Tsui and West Kowloon facing them, hold the towers that appear in photographs, squeezed between Victoria Harbour and the slope up to Victoria Peak. Much of the taller stock is nowhere near the harbor: Kowloon East, Tseung Kwan O and the New Territories new towns hold hundreds of residential blocks above 100 m.
That is what sets Hong Kong apart from the other big skyline cities. Most of its tall buildings are apartments. New York and Chicago built their skylines out of offices; Hong Kong's second boom from the late 1990s onward went vertical with housing, and estates such as The Cullinan and Sorrento put 60 to 70 residential floors over a railway station. More people here live or work above the fifteenth floor than anywhere else on earth.
Every evening at eight the Symphony of Lights runs lasers and floodlights across more than 40 buildings on both sides of the harbor for about 13 minutes, set to a soundtrack on radio and along the Tsim Sha Tsui promenade. It has run since 2004, and Guinness World Records listed it as the largest permanent light and sound show.
Built for typhoons
Hong Kong sits in the track of South China Sea typhoons, and a signal 10 storm can push gusts past 230 km/h at roof height. The local wind code is one of the strictest anywhere, and towers here are designed around it with aerodynamic plan shapes, openings through the upper levels to bleed pressure, outrigger trusses tying the core to the perimeter columns, and damping to cut the sway a resident feels. The gaps cut through some residential slabs do the same job, and local feng shui practice reads them as dragon gates.
Swaying is normal and designed for: our page on sway has the numbers and the supertall page covers what changes above 300 m. The skyscraper cities page places Hong Kong next to Shenzhen, whose Ping An Finance Center reaches 599 m, and New York, where One World Trade Center reaches 541 m.