Citibank Plaza Essay

Citibank Plaza

Building Description:

Citibank Plaza is the headquarters of CitiCorp in Hong Kong. It is designed by Leo A. Daily (Rocco Design Architects Ltd), and completed in 1992. Now, the building is located in 3 Garden Road, Central, Hong Kong, which across both the old (Queen’s Road Central) and the new (Admiralty and Queensway) commercial cores. The building is with the height of 205.5 m and there are 47 floors above ground and 3 floors below ground. And, the building was awarded the HKIA Silver Medal 1994.

1. Structure

Citibank Plaza is made of concrete; silver mirrored glass, aluminium cladding and flamed granite. The reinforced concrete allowing a floor loading of 5kN/m2 with raised flooring height of 140 mm, raised flooring loading of 5kN/m2, and raised floor to ceiling clearance of 2560 mm.

The floor-to-ceiling height is 2.6 m, there is suspended false ceiling system with integrated lighting and air-conditioning outlets. For typical curtain wall to core depth, Citibank Tower curved wall is 17 m to 18 m and Citibank Tower straight wall is 11 m to 12 m. Then, the glass-to-core depth is 17m.

Besides, the

Heat Strengthened glass aims at providing resistance to thermal stress, and heat building up in the building during daytime. Its flatter surface has a less optical distortions to the surroundings. Although it is resistant to chemical, hardness and deflection which gives the advantage to minimize the maintenance cost. Since the window to wall ratio of Citibank Plaza in its curtain wall is almost combined with 90% of single glazed glasses, which is not effective in insulating the heat, it may cost much in electricity expenditure during summer compared with the double glazed glasses used in Cheung Kong