Jockey Club Innovation Tower: Zaha Hadid's Only Campus Work in Hong Kong

PolyU comprehensive information database · 05 Campus module

The buildings of PolyU's Hung Hom campus can largely be read as a condensed history of "three generations of architectural language": the red-brick Core/Block system established by James Kinoshita's team in the 1970s, the "red brick + glass" postmodern eclecticism of the Li Ka Shing Tower in 2001, and the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (JCIT), designed by Zaha Hadid in 2014 — whose fluid form decisively breaks with the rectilinear tradition of the first two generations. With all three generations standing side by side on one campus, architecture and culture publications have called PolyU "Hong Kong's undervalued modern landmark". This article focuses on the star of the third generation: JCIT took seven years from winning the competition to its opening, and is Hadid's only permanent architectural legacy in Hong Kong. For a full catalogue of campus buildings, see 〈Signature buildings and landmarks〉; this article does not repeat other towers.

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# 1. The designer: who was Zaha Hadid?

Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, winner of the 2004 Pritzker Architecture Prize^※ — the first woman and first Arab woman to receive the prize. Known for deconstructivism and parametric design, her major works include the Guangzhou Opera House and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Notably, Hadid first made her name as early as 1983 with her entry for Hong Kong's "The Peak" competition on Victoria Peak — but that design was never built. The Jockey Club Innovation Tower thus stands as her only physical architectural legacy in Hong Kong. Hadid died on 31 March 2016^※, just two years after the tower's opening.

Hadid was also the first woman to receive the 2015 RIBA Royal Gold Medal^※ in her own right. The Innovation Tower was designed under the joint direction of Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, with local practice AGC Design serving as the Hong Kong registered architect; structural and building-services engineering was handled by Ove Arup & Partners Hong Kong Ltd., and the curtain-wall works were undertaken by YKK AP Facade Hong Kong Ltd and Beijing Jangho Curtain Wall Co. Ltd.

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# 2. From competition win to opening: seven years in the life of a tower

From design competition to official opening, the Jockey Club Innovation Tower took roughly seven years, with several delays along the way:

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust^※ donated a total of HK$249 million (approved in 2011, covering construction, fit-out, and three years of operating costs for the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation), which is how the building came to bear the "Jockey Club" name. The English Wikipedia additionally records a total floor area of 15,000 m² (approximately 160,000 sq ft), with a net operational floor area of about 12,000 m²^※ (both figures given side by side).

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# 3. Three generations of architectural language: where the Innovation Tower sits on campus

PolyU moved to its current Hung Hom site in 1957. When the Hong Kong Polytechnic was formally established in 1972, a team led by architect James Kinoshita (of Palmer & Turner) gave the first phase of the campus its signature red-brick design, drawing on the "red-brick university" tradition of Britain and America as a visual counterpart to PolyU's applied, engineering-led identity. The spatial skeleton of the Hung Hom campus consists of two elements: the Core — cylindrical service cores housing lifts, stairs, toilets and plant rooms, named by letters A to U/Z (skipping I, K and O); and the Block / Wing — rectangular teaching and administrative spaces, some named after donors. The cores act as nodes linking the rectangular blocks into a network; the system is both a wayfinding feature and a source of the campus's "maze-like" reputation (see the campus-lore angle in 〈15 campus lore · Red brick and the lettered cores〉). Another characteristic of the first-generation buildings is that many are raised one level above a podium, creating sheltered semi-outdoor spaces at ground level — a sensible response to Hong Kong's hot, humid and rainy climate.

Li Ka Shing Tower (Block M) is the "middle chapter" of this architectural history. The tallest building on campus, completed in 2001, it reinterprets the surrounding red-brick aesthetic in a postmodern idiom, according to a Zolima CityMag architecture feature^※ — inserting bands of red brick running between curtains of glass. In this way the new tower both acknowledges the old campus's red-brick character and announces a change of era in modern glass language: it neither copies the pure red brick of the 1970s nor abandons right angles altogether like the Innovation Tower, but occupies a pragmatic middle ground of red-brick bands plus glass curtain wall — making it the key transitional object for understanding how PolyU's architecture "went from red brick to fluid". According to a CK Hutchison press release^※, the tower is named after philanthropist Mr. Li Ka-shing in recognition of his donation, with design involvement from Wong Tung and other teams^※.

By the time the Innovation Tower arrived in 2014, the campus's architectural language had completed its turn from "rectangular red brick" to "fluid white" — three generations on a single campus, a rare stratigraphic sample of Hong Kong's architectural eras.

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# 4. How a fluid form broke the red-brick grain: reading the design

# Overturning the "tower and podium" convention

High-rise buildings in Hong Kong generally follow a hierarchical "podium + tower" logic — a low-rise podium serving as the public base, with the tower stacked vertically above. The Jockey Club Innovation Tower's design strategy is the opposite: Zaha Hadid Architects' starting point was to "dissolve" this orthodox typology, merging the concrete podium and the louvred tower body into a single continuous building of fluid form, so that no clear boundary between podium and tower can be read from the outside. Architecture media^※ described the effect as "a constant fluid dialogue between a series of volumes". The English Wikipedia likewise records that it "dissolves the classic typography of tower and podium into a seamlessly fluid structure"^※.

# The "ship prow" and the wider-at-the-top silhouette

The Innovation Tower's most striking visual feature is its "wider at the top, narrower at the base, tilting upward" silhouette — a subtractive transformation that gives the whole mass the look of a ship's prow: the upper floors have a larger footprint than the lower ones, with the volume cantilevering outward and leaning, so that there is almost no traditional vertical facade in the conventional sense. This creates a sharp contrast with the rectangular red-brick volumes of the rest of the Hung Hom campus: within one campus, the 1970s red-brick Core/Block system is built on horizontal repetition, while the Innovation Tower breaks that grain with a single leaning, bending, cantilevered fluid form.

# Louvres and facade unity

The visual transition between podium and tower body is handled by a system of sun-shading louvres: their alignment twists along the building's curved surfaces, carrying horizontal lines across the entire facade and fusing podium and tower into one visual whole. The louvres serve a shading function while also providing the main textural language of the building's skin, creating shifting light and shadow at different angles and reinforcing the sense of fluidity.

# Internal voids and natural light

Inside, the building contains several "voids" — vertically continuous open spaces that bring natural daylight deep into the floors while also providing natural ventilation. Hadid said at the opening ceremony:

"JCIT establishes PolyU's vision for future achievements. With the seamlessly fluid new structure, the Tower initiates a creative and multidisciplinary environment." —Zaha Hadid, March 2014^※

Exposed porticos, corridors running through in all directions, and friendly, comfortable public spaces cross the Innovation Tower internally and externally from various angles, connecting to the campus's other buildings — a spatial strategy that deliberately blurs the boundaries between "indoor/outdoor" and "public/academic".

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# 5. How big is the Innovation Tower? Specifications at a glance

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# 6. What is housed inside?

The Jockey Club Innovation Tower is the full home of PolyU's School of Design (SD) and also houses the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation (JC.DISI) — established in 2012^※ and described as the first design institute in Asia dedicated to social innovation.

The main facilities are distributed by floor as follows:

Teaching spaces include 1 lecture theatre and 10 classrooms^※, along with several exhibition areas, a public viewing gallery and various research laboratories. The "Innovation Gallery" on the podium level is an exhibition space open to the public, serving as a bridge between the School and the community.

The School of Design's lineage can be traced back to the design courses of the Hong Kong Technical College in 1964^※: it was elevated to a "Department of Design" in the 1970s when the Polytechnic was established, renamed the "Swire School of Design" in the 1980s with the launch of bachelor's degree programmes, formally became the "School of Design" in 1994 when PolyU attained university status, and was named one of the world's top design schools by BusinessWeek in 2006. Before moving into the Innovation Tower, the School of Design was scattered across several buildings on campus; the Tower gave it, for the first time, a purpose-built single home — workshops, research centres, exhibition spaces and the Dean's office all concentrated in one fluid building, which has mattered substantially for both the School's brand and the teaching-and-research experience.

In recent years, the School of Design's international visibility has kept rising: in the QS World University Rankings by Subject for art and design, it placed 22nd globally in the 2025 edition^※ (first in Hong Kong), 19th globally in the 2024 edition^※, and has appeared in the global top 30 every year since 2015^※. The School's official line is that the world-class environment the Innovation Tower provides is key hardware in its push to attract international talent.

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# 7. What architectural awards has it won?

The citation for the 2016 RIBA International Award for Excellence^※ noted that the Innovation Tower "has set a high standard for the promotion of excellence in the general advancement of architecture". It was also among the last major architectural honours Hadid received in her lifetime.

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# 8. A dissenting voice: not everyone welcomed this "rebel"

According to Zolima CityMag, Kinoshita Mio — the architect who led the campus's original design — had reservations about adding such a stylistically alien building, calling it "the wrong choice of architect^※" and saying it would give the campus "a different personality" (per Zolima CityMag). This database presents both the original designer's and the new building's perspectives side by side, without adjudicating.

Separately, per Zolima and other architecture commentary, while the Innovation Tower was under construction, a group of red-brick buildings (informally known as Block Z) went up to its north-west; some commentators felt this new red-brick block obstructed views of the Innovation Tower and made it feel more cramped. This "spatial contest between old red-brick language and the new fluid landmark" is a detail that keeps coming up in architectural circles discussions of PolyU's campus fabric. We record its existence without settling the matter.

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# 9. Architectural heritage value: a modern landmark rediscovered

In recent years, the Hung Hom campus has drawn renewed attention from the architecture-and-culture world as a representative example of Hong Kong's 1970s modernist campus architecture. ZOLIMA CITYMAG's feature series, titled "Hong Kong's Modern Heritage", discusses PolyU alongside both James Kinoshita and Zaha Hadid — the former establishing the red-brick idiom, the latter contributing the fluid landmark, with the Li Ka Shing Tower's postmodern transition in between. Within a single campus, one can move from the 1970s red-brick Core/Block system, to the 2001 red-brick-plus-glass, to the 2014 fluid Innovation Tower — this kind of "generational stacking" of architecture is rare among Hong Kong campuses, making PolyU a living specimen for observing the evolution of Hong Kong's modern architecture (an architectural-culture observation).

The start-up incubator InnoHub also operates inside the Innovation Tower — a landmark named for "innovation" that is at once the School of Design's home and a working incubation site, where name and function coincide (see 〈04-research · Output and innovation〉).

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