Jardine House

Jardine House is an office tower at 1 Connaught Place in Central, on Hong Kong Island. It has 52 floors and is about 178.5 meters tall. When it was finished in 1973 it was the tallest building in Hong Kong and in Asia, and it was known as Connaught Centre before it got its current name.

The tower is easy to recognize because the walls are covered with about 1,700 round windows, like the portholes of a ship. It was designed by the firm Palmer and Turner, and it is owned by Hongkong Land, a company linked to the Jardines trading group. In 1980 the Hopewell Centre took over the record of tallest building in Hong Kong.

The three earlier Jardine Houses

Before this tower, the first three Jardine Houses stood at 20 Pedder Street, at the corner of Des Voeux Road Central. The first was built in 1864 in a style that borrowed arches and pillars from Neoclassical architecture. The second came in 1908, and about 1956 it was rebuilt as a 16-storey building. That building was sold when the company bought land for the Landmark complex. Some metal lettering from the old Jardine House was kept and reused in the new building.

Building on reclaimed land

The new tower was built on reclaimed land, with a 75-year lease that Hongkong Land won in 1970 at a record price of HK$258 million, payable over ten years. In return, the government promised that no building directly north of it would ever block its view, so the nearby General Post Office was limited to 37 meters. Construction cost an estimated HK$120 million and took 16 months. Walkways connect the tower to other buildings of the company, such as Exchange Square.

On the globe

The model shows a slim tower covered in round porthole windows. Look for the repeating circles.