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

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) Comprehensive Information Database · 05 Campus Module

The architecture of PolyU's Hung Hom campus can largely be read as a condensed history of three generations of architectural language: the redbrick Core/Block system established by the team of James Kinoshita in the 1970s; the postmodern "redbrick plus glass" eclecticism of the 2001 Li Ka Shing Tower; and the 2014 Jockey Club Innovation Tower (JCIT), designed by Zaha Hadid, which thoroughly breaks with the orthogonal tradition of the preceding two generations with its fluid forms. Three stylistic generations sharing a single campus frame has led architectural culture media to call PolyU "Hong Kong's underrated modern landmark." This article focuses on the protagonist of the third generation: the JCIT, which took seven years from competition win to inauguration and stands as Hadid's only permanent architectural legacy in Hong Kong. For a full directory of campus buildings, see Iconic Buildings and Landmarks; other blocks are not duplicated here.

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# 1. The Architect: Who Was Zaha Hadid?

Zaha Hadid (1950–2016) was an Iraqi-British architect, the 2004 laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize^※, and the first woman and first Arab woman to receive the award. She was renowned for deconstructivism and parametric design, with major works including the Guangzhou Opera House and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku. Notably, as early as 1983, Hadid shot to prominence with her winning entry for "The Peak" competition at Victoria Peak in Hong Kong, though that design was never built—making the Jockey Club Innovation Tower her only realised architectural legacy in the city. Hadid passed away on 31 March 2016^※, a mere two years after the Tower's inauguration.

Hadid was also the first woman to receive the RIBA Royal Gold Medal^※ in her own right, in 2015. The design of the Innovation Tower was led jointly by Hadid and Patrik Schumacher, with local architecture firm AGC Design serving as the locally registered architect, structural and building services engineering by Ove Arup & Partners Hong Kong Ltd., and the façade works undertaken by YKK AP Facade Hong Kong Ltd and Beijing Jangho Curtain Wall Co. Ltd.

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# 2. From Competition to Inauguration: Seven Years of a Building

The Jockey Club Innovation Tower took roughly seven years from the design competition to its official opening, experiencing several delays along the way:

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust^※ donated a total of HK$249 million (approved in July 2011, covering construction, fitting-out, and three years of operating costs for the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation), which gave the building its "Jockey Club" prefix. The English Wikipedia also notes a gross floor area of 15,000 square metres (approximately 160,000 square feet) and a net operational floor area of around 12,000 square metres^※ (citing both metrics side by side).

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# 3. Three Generations of Architectural Language: The Tower's Place in the Campus Context

PolyU moved to its current Hung Hom site in 1957. With the formal establishment of the Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1972, the team led by architect James Kinoshita (of Palmer & Turner) set the iconic redbrick design for the campus's first phase of development, drawing imagery from the traditional "redbrick universities" of Britain and America, creating a visual echo of PolyU's applied, technology-oriented identity. The spatial skeleton of the Hung Hom campus is formed by two element types: Cores—cylindrical service cores containing lifts, staircases, toilets, and mechanical rooms, designated by the letters A to U/Z (skipping I, K, O); and Blocks / Wings—rectangular teaching and administrative spaces, some named after donors. Like nodes, the Cores link the rectangular Blocks into a network, a system that is both a wayfinding feature and the source of its "labyrinthine feel" (for the campus culture aspect, see 15 Campus Lore · Red Brick and Lettered Cores). Another characteristic of the first-generation buildings is that many blocks were raised one level above the podium, creating sheltered, semi-outdoor spaces at ground level suited to Hong Kong's hot, humid, and rainy climate.

Li Ka Shing Tower (Block M) is the "intermediate link" in this architectural history. It is the tallest building on campus, completed in 2001. According to a Zolima CityMag architecture feature^※, the building reinterprets the surrounding redbrick aesthetic in a postmodern manner—by embedding bands of red brick running between curtains of glass. This gesture allowed the new building to echo the old campus's redbrick base while proclaiming a shift in era with its modern glass language: it neither copied the pure red brick of the 1970s, nor did it abandon orthogonal geometry as completely as the Innovation Tower would. Instead, its compromise of redbrick bands plus a glass curtain wall makes it the key transitional piece for understanding how PolyU’s architecture moved "from red brick to fluid." According to a CKH Group press release^※, the building was named in honour of the philanthropist Mr. Li Ka-shing in recognition of his donation, with the design involving teams such as Wong Tung^※.

By the time of the Innovation Tower in 2014, the campus's architectural language had completed a thorough shift from "rectangular red brick" to "fluid white"—three generations of style framed within a single campus, forming a rare sample of Hong Kong architectural stratification.

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# 4. How the Fluid Form Disrupted the Redbrick Fabric: A Design Language Analysis

# Overturning the “Tower and Podium” Tradition

High-rise buildings in Hong Kong generally follow a stratified logic of "podium plus tower"—a low-rise podium serving as a public base, with the tower stacked vertically above. The design strategy for the Jockey Club Innovation Tower does the opposite: the departure point for Hadid's firm was to "dissolve" this orthodox typology, unifying the concrete podium and the louvred tower body into a single continuous building through a fluid form, making it impossible to visually distinguish a clear podium–tower boundary. Architectural media^※ have described the effect as "a continuous dialogue of fluid volumes." The English Wikipedia also records it as dissolving the classic typography of tower and podium into a seamlessly fluid structure^※.

# The ‘Ship Prow’ Image and the Top-Heavy Profile

The Innovation Tower's most striking visual characteristic is its profile—wider at the top, narrower at the base, tilting upwards—achieved through a subtractive deformation technique, giving the overall form the approximate shape of a ship's prow: the upper floor plates are larger than the lower ones, and the building mass cantilevers and inclines outwards, with almost no traditionally vertical external wall. This creates a strong contrast with the rectangular redbrick volumes of the rest of PolyU’s Hung Hom campus: within the same grounds, the horizontally repetitive base rhythm of the 1970s redbrick Core/Block system is interrupted by a single tilted, bent, cantilevered fluid form.

# Louvres and Façade Unity

The visual transition between podium and tower is managed by a system of shading louvres: the louvres twist along the building's curved surfaces, extending horizontal lines across the entire façade so that podium and tower visually merge into one. The louvres serve a sun-shading function while also providing the primary textural language of the skin, producing variations of light and shadow under different sun angles and further enhancing the sense of fluidity.

# Internal Voids and Natural Daylighting

The building's interior contains multiple "voids"—vertically continuous open spaces that bring natural daylight deep into the floors while also providing natural ventilation. Hadid stated at the inauguration 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 porches, corridors traversing in multiple directions, and intimate, comfortable public spaces crisscross the Innovation Tower from various orientations and connect to various campus buildings—a spatial strategy that deliberately blurs the boundaries between "indoor / outdoor" and "public / academic."

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# 5. How Big Is the Tower? Specification Data at a Glance

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# 6. What Facilities and Academic Units Does It House?

The Jockey Club Innovation Tower is the complete home for the PolyU School of Design (SD), and also houses the Jockey Club Design Institute for Social Innovation (JCDISI)—the latter established in 2012^※, described as the first design institute in Asia focused on social innovation.

The main facilities, distributed by floor, are as follows:

Teaching spaces include 1 lecture theatre and 10 classrooms^※, along with multiple exhibition areas, public viewing galleries, and various research laboratories. Among these, the "Innovation Gallery" located on the podium levels is an exhibition space open to the public, serving the connective function between the School and the community.

The School of Design traces its roots to a design programme at the Hong Kong Technical College in 1964^※: it was elevated to a "Department of Design" with the establishment of the Hong Kong Polytechnic in the 1970s, renamed the "Swire School of Design" and launched degree programmes in the 1980s, and formally became the "School of Design" when PolyU attained university status in 1994. In 2006, it was named one of the world's top design schools by BusinessWeek. Before moving into the Innovation Tower, the School of Design was scattered across several buildings on campus; the Tower gave the School its first purpose-built complete home—with workshops, research centres, exhibition spaces, and the Dean's Office all concentrated in a single fluid building, which has had a material impact on both the School's brand and the teaching-research experience.

In recent years, the international visibility of PolyU's School of Design has continued to rise: in the QS World University Rankings by Subject—Art & Design, the 2025 edition places it 22nd globally^※ (first in Hong Kong), the 2024 edition placed it 19th globally^※, and it has been continuously ranked in the global top 30 since 2015^※. The world-class teaching and research environment provided by the Innovation Tower is regarded by the School administration as critical hardware for boosting international recruitment competitiveness.

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# 7. What Architecture Awards Has It Won?

The citation for the 2016 RIBA International Award for Excellence^※ noted that the Innovation Tower "sets a high standard for the improvement of the quality of civil architecture generally." This award was also among the last significant architectural accolades Hadid received before her death.

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# 8. A Dissenting Voice: Not Everyone Welcomed This ‘Rebel’

According to Zolima CityMag, James Kinoshita, the architect who led the original campus design, had reservations about adding such a stylistically divergent building, commenting that it was 「選錯了建築師(the wrong choice of architect)」^※ and would force the campus "to take on a different character" (per Zolima CityMag). This database presents the perspectives of the original designer and the new building side by side, without adjudicating.

Also according to architectural commentary in Zolima and elsewhere, a group of redbrick buildings (commonly known as Block Z) was constructed to the northwest of the Innovation Tower around the same time; some critics have suggested that this new redbrick block obstructs views of the Innovation Tower, making it feel more hemmed in. This "spatial chess game between the old redbrick language and the new fluid landmark" is a detail frequently mentioned in architectural circles when discussing PolyU's campus fabric. It is recorded here without a final judgment.

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# 9. Architectural Heritage Value: A Modern Landmark Rediscovered

In recent years, PolyU's Hung Hom campus, as a representative example of Hong Kong's 1970s modernist campus architecture, has gained renewed attention from the architectural culture sphere. The Zolima CityMag feature was expressly headlined "Hong Kong's Modern Heritage," discussing PolyU alongside James Kinoshita and Zaha Hadid—the former having laid down the redbrick base, the latter having contributed a fluid landmark, with the postmodern transition of the Li Ka Shing Tower in between. To be able to read, on a single campus, the progression from the 1970s redbrick Core/Block system, through the 2001 red brick plus glass, to the 2014 fluid Innovation Tower—this kind of "generational architectural coexistence" is rare among Hong Kong campuses, making PolyU a living specimen for observing the evolution of modern architecture in Hong Kong (this constitutes an architectural culture observation).

The start-up incubator InnoHub is also located within the Innovation Tower—a landmark named after "Innovation" that is both the home of the School of Design and a live site for entrepreneurial incubation, where the building's name and function converge (see 04-Research · Output and Innovation).

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