1 · Position
The contract to build and run the airport railway went to MTR in 1992, and the master plan for the air rights around Kowloon Station was drawn by TFP Farrells: a three-dimensional mixed-use quarter, towers on a massive podium. The tender for the last two phases went to Sun Hung Kai in October 2000 at an estimated HK$29 billion. Wong & Ouyang was appointed lead architect in 2001, with Kohn Pedersen Fox as consultant on the tower. Elements opened on 1 October 2007; the ICC completed in 2010 at 484 metres, the tallest building in Hong Kong.
2 · ⚑ The name is almost never used, and that is the entry
Union Square is the formal name of a place that people describe only by its parts — Elements, the ICC, the W, and apartment complexes called The Arch, Sorrento and The Cullinan. A trade magazine calls it a walled city in West Kowloon: a self-contained metropolis of sixteen towers on a mall and a train station, whether it is the apex or the nadir of Hong Kong-style planning depends on your perspective. No other entry in this Part records a development so complete that its own name failed to attach to it. The register keeps the name because the thing is one object, and records that nobody says it.
3 · What it does with a hotel
The Ritz-Carlton occupies the top fifteen floors with its lobby at 425 metres — on completion the highest hotel in the world, passing the Grand Hyatt in the Jin Mao Tower. The architects recognised the problem their own building created: the journey up to a lobby at that height would need to be something of an experience, and forecourts were carved out of the podium so that arriving at the base matched the scale of the towers. Read against LHL-S-243 Brickell City Centre and LHL-S-247 Taikoo Hui, this is the pattern at its extreme: a hotel is no longer a building on a street but a set of floors in a stack over a platform.
4 · ⚑ The financial term worth recording
Sun Hung Kai was required to give the rental and management rights of 78 per cent of the shopping mall to MTR. The railway keeps the retail income above its own station. That is the mechanism by which a transport operator becomes a landlord, and it is why the Kowloon and Taikoo patterns exist at all.
5 · Candour
⚑ The figures disagree throughout and the entry carries them. The ICC is given as 108 and 118 storeys — one account notes it depends how you count — and as 484 m and 490 m. The Ritz-Carlton is given as 312 rooms and as more than 300. The mall is 82,750 m² in the tender, 93,000 m² in one record and 146,000 m² in another, which are probably different phases. The original 2000 proposal was for 102 floors and 574 m, and was cut. ⚑ Not established here: what forced the reduction, and the current ownership of the residential towers.