It is a welcoming, healthy, and sustainable office architecture in the heart of Kowloon East, where it explicitly illustrates a delightful balance between optimal user experience and community engagement, and a vision of harmonic design between commercial viability and environmental responsibility.  

Functionally, the project aims to create a healthy built environment to occupants through appropriate use of shading devices, non-toxic finishes and maximizing views and natural daylight. Socially, the public podium garden for exercises and outdoor relaxation affirms the project's identity as an urban oasis.  Environmentally, the variety of green technologies and passive design strategies ensure the building's long-term sustainability, and low energy consumption and carbon emission.

From building orientation and massing, diverse functional program, innovative technologies, landscape design, to the pursuit of work-life balance and community engagement, the project exemplifies an integrated design approach that involves seamless exchange and coordination among various design disciplines and the client in the making of an office architecture with optimal performances functionally, socially, and environmentally.

The Quayside at 77 Hoi Bun Road is a mixed-use commercial development which provides approximately 82,000m² of office and retail spaces with a vision of creating a green, sustainable and healthily built environment. The building comprises of 17 levels of Grade-A offices and 3 levels of podium retail separated by a sky garden accessible by both the public and tenants, 3 basement carpark levels, and a roof garden for use by the office tenants. The Quayside is located in the heart of Kowloon East District, considered the up-and-coming second green and highly liveable Central Business District, CBD2. In line with the district’s visionary future, the project has already been pre-certified to the world’s most recognised green building labels, namely LEED-C&S Certification Platinum, BEAM Plus Final Platinum and WELL-C&S Pre-certification Gold.

Situated within the Kowloon Bay Action Area, the development has become the pedestrian hub which stands in the public realm and connects the future low-carbon green community in its neighbourhood. To mitigate the air and noise pollution from the surrounding industrial buildings and busy traffic network, The Quayside has perfectly exemplified a holistic design approach that integrates sustainability into its building designs, from planning, building facades orientation, architectural design, building systems to its interiors, such as, building setbacks created for public spaces, extensive use of green walls externally and internally, and lush ground landscaping serving as effective buffer between the heavily trafficked road and the development.

Advanced simulation technologies were used to analyse the microclimate conditions: neighbour daylight impact, traffic glare and solar heat gain to optimise both the building user experience and community engagement. With the localized shading requirement being identified through the analysis, the design has optimized the building performance and mitigated excessive solar heat gain by varying the sunshade fins with different shapes and depths on the facades. Combined with high-performance glazing, the building design ensures substantially low building cooling load by achieving the Overall Thermal Transfer Value (OTTV) of about 18W/m², exceptionally lower than the 24 W/m² statutory requirement.

To build a healthy environment, The Quayside has incorporated extensive landscaping whereby the total greenery covers 30% of its site area. The 3/F podium garden acts as an Urban Oasis providing open area for social gatherings, relaxation and exercising, equipped with pollutant-reducing plants, seating and kinetic exercise facilities that promote the concept of work-life balance in the community. Innovative Air Induction Units (AIUs) are installed with carbon filters to enhance the thermal comfort by inducing and amplify air movement which shields the exhaust and pollutants from the highway traffic for better air quality in this semi-outdoor recreational area. Healthy stairwell with enhanced lighting and vibrant artworks like the stepped plaza on 2/F has served to promote the use of staircases for users’ health and wellness purposes.

To ensure the building’s long-term sustainability, diverse green technologies and passive design strategies are adopted. They include VSD chillers, demand control ventilation (DCV), highly efficient lighting system, regenerative lifts and rainwater recycling, to name but a few. With the application of all the energy efficient measures, the building energy use is targeted to be reduced by around 30% when compared to the Building Energy Code (BEC2012) baseline established regionally in Hong Kong. Among the strategies, the building has integrated an innovative solar hot water system with the dehumidification system for regenerating the desiccant material. The design can address Hong Kong’s high humidity conditions and reduces the annual building energy consumption by 2% in the meantime.

To maintain the project sustainability into future operations, screens at entrance lobbies will display the building real-time energy performance. The performance display will also show the environmental quality and share some tips on greener lifestyle which aims to drive user behaviour change through education and connection to the community.