The West Kowloon landmark project in Hong Kong, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, is rapidly taking shape. This futuristic building, regarded as a transformative departure from traditional office typologies in Hong Kong, reshapes the city skyline with its highly sculptural, flowing form.
As one of the key curtain wall glass suppliers for this landmark project, once the most valuable development site in Hong Kong, NorthGlass, with its industry-leading “Super Flat & Spotless” glass manufacturing capabilities and high-precision curved tempering technology, has delivered approximately 60,000 square metres of high-performance architectural glass solutions for this world-class building.
The project uses approximately 14,000 glass panels, with nearly every piece differing in size, shape and curvature. Among them, curved glass accounts for around 25,000 square metres, with the largest single panel reaching 5 metres. A large proportion of 3 by 3 metre oversized tempered glass panels are used, imposing stringent requirements on flatness, optical quality and batch consistency.
To meet these requirements, NorthGlass fully leveraged its independently developed tempering equipment and process technologies. Using its top-tier proprietary tempering furnace systems, combined with intelligent out-of-furnace temperature control, super-symmetric heating technology and gapless convection heating, the glass is heated more uniformly, significantly improving flatness and optical quality for oversized panels, ensuring a clear, true and continuous reflective façade effect.
For the large volume of curved and irregular glass, NorthGlass adopted its self-developed automatic arc-forming tempering furnace. With a precise thermal field control system and automated forming technology, it achieves high-precision shaping for varying radii, bidirectional bends, and complex curved surfaces, ensuring each glass panel precisely matches architectural design requirements.
In terms of glazing configuration, the project adopts a silver-grey laminated insulated glass system combined with NorthGlass solar control coating and double-silver Low-E glass. This achieves a highly transparent visual effect while significantly improving building energy efficiency.
The combination of high-performance glass and complex curved structures not only gives the building a futuristic appearance but also demonstrates NorthGlass’s comprehensive technical strength in the field of high-end architectural glass.