Highcliff
A 75-storey residential tower so thin it has a 1:20 slenderness ratio — and needed the world's first passive wind damper fitted to a residential building just to stand through typhoon season.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Hong Kong offline.
Highcliff is the tallest all-residential tower on Hong Kong Island, and one of the thinnest buildings on earth. Completed in 2003 to a design by DLN Architects & Engineers, it took Silver at the Emporis Skyscraper Award that year, losing only to 30 St Mary Axe in London. The engineering problem it solved — how to keep a pencil-thin tower upright in typhoons — required fitting the world's first passive wind damper for a residential building at the top of the structure.
What to look for
- The extreme silhouette: 75 floors compressed into a slenderness ratio of 1:20, making the tower look implausibly narrow against the Happy Valley hillside
- The passive wind damper at the top — the first ever fitted to a residential building, installed because typhoons strike Hong Kong most late summers
- The Chopsticks: pair Highcliff visually with The Summit next door and you see two near-identical pencil towers that gave rise to the nickname
Viewable from the street on the south slope of Happy Valley, Hong Kong Island; it is a private residential building with no public interior access.
Highcliff is one of 34 sights worth the detour in Hong Kong, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Hong Kong pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Hong Kong
- International Commerce CentreAt 484 m, this is the only building in Hong Kong with more than 100 floors — and it had to be trimmed down so it wouldn't overtop the surrounding mountains.
- Bank of China TowerThe first skyscraper outside the United States to break 1,000 feet — its glass triangles cut the Central skyline unlike anything around it.
- Central PlazaA four-bar neon clock 374 metres above Wan Chai changes colour every 15 minutes, blinking at each quarter-hour change.
- Hong Kong DisneylandThe only Disneyland where a walkway was deliberately bent so good qi energy would not drain into the South China Sea.
- The CenterAfter dark, hundreds of neon bars scroll slowly through the full color spectrum from base to crown — a light show wired into the steel itself.
- Tsing Ma BridgeThe span that ended Lantau Island's water-only isolation — 1,377 metres of road and rail hung from two towers.