Kai Tak Cruise Terminal Building | Hong Kong, China | AECOM

August 15, 2024 Damian Holmes Asia, Design, Landscape Architecture, Project

From the airport to the seaport

The Kai Tak Cruise Terminal is one of the world’s foremost super cruise facilities. It occupies a unique site: the old runway of Kai Tak Airport in Victoria Harbor. This remarkable project touches on three regional priorities, the legacy of Hong Kong as a transportation hub, the revitalization of the old Kai Tak Airport site, and the importance of regional and international tourism to the Greater Bay Area and how that connectivity builds on the past present and future of Hong Kong.

An exclusive space made public

The terminal establishes Hong Kong as the preeminent regional and international hub for cruise liners, with the capacity to berth two large vessels. Its highly flexible design also provides for year-round activities, events, and exhibitions.

Alongside the cruise terminal will be a range of tourist facilities, including hotels, retail, restaurants, and an aviation-themed park, which provide leisure for visitors and residents. Typically, a cruise terminal building would be limited to those who intend to travel. Moreover, it would render the waterfront parallel to it inaccessible to the public. The Kai Tak Cruise Terminal challenges the typology by integrating a public rooftop park, the largest rooftop garden in Hong Kong at 23,000 square meters. Thus, the 850-meter length it occupies retains the continuity of the Kai Tak public waterfront and enhances it with more amenities such as lawns, a plaza, and a water garden.

By integrating this once inaccessible corner of Kowloon into the public open space network, it becomes an important link between the district’s developments, which include an upcoming sports complex inland and the Kwun Tong Promenade across the channel to the Kai Tak Runway Park at the tip. Moreover, its platform provides people with incredible and unmatched views of both Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula.

The terminal is a starter for Kai Tak’s redevelopment, which is a key piece of the economic transformation of Kowloon East as a new central business district for Hong Kong. Through its innovative design and focus on sustainable economic and environmental goals, this iconic piece of transport infrastructure celebrates a new urban gateway and introduces a new typology of green infrastructure, one that defines the waterfront through its unique architecture but also redefines Hong Kong’s waterfront and the public realm at the heart of one of the world’s most densely urban environments.