HSBC Building Hong Kong

The HSBC Main Building is the Hong Kong headquarters of The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, designed by the British architect Norman Foster and completed in 1985 on Statue Square in Central Hong Kong. Rising 178.8 metres over 47 stories, it was built using a steel suspension structure with no internal supporting columns, assembled from five massive prefabricated modules manufactured in Britain and shipped to the site, and its construction cost of roughly 5.2 billion Hong Kong dollars made it the most expensive building in the world at the time. The design channels natural light deep into the building through a mirror system at the top of its atrium and uses seawater rather than fresh water for cooling, both intended to conserve energy. The building's two bronze lion statues, cast in 1935 for an earlier headquarters on the same site, were moved aside during construction in 1981 and returned once the new building was finished.