The skyline of Hong Kong
By looking at the concept, you can probably see that as a design challenge it was pretty much a no-win situation. As a designer, I'm tasked with the job of designing something that it is totally appropriate for the skyline of Hong Kong.
But all of the criteria that good architecture needs to meet to be beautiful, wonderful & celebrated, are not the criteria I had before me to design this building.
I had to simply make it look like this building was designed by those criteria. It had to appear to be designed by those criteria, but the real criteria was to give Dwayne Johnson access to a building that was on fire, higher than any other building on the skyline.
I'm sure you can appreciate, as any other architect who looks into the design of this building, that no matter what we did, we were doomed for failure in the eyes of the architectural community.
Especially because there were a couple of other things too that were very much the tail end of the dog in terms of the design process.
The sky line involves Dwayne Johnson coming in above the 100th floor which is where this fire has cut off the rest of the building down below, and that's where his family is. And he has to go save his family.
He enters the building in a very dramatic fashion – it's on the posters – then finds his family and constantly has to move up, away from danger and ends up putting himself in even more peril.
That is the design criteria for me, as a dramatic designer. As a designer who also wants to make the building look appropriate, as a piece of architecture, that was a real challenge.
The director, had also written in that at the top is this dome-like structure which he called The Pearl, and why the building was called The Pearl in the original script, which houses all sorts of technological marvels, on top of being in a spectacular place – close to 2,700 feet in the air.
To make the building look appropriate, as a piece of architecture, that was a real challenge
The first real challenge was to make a very, very tall building with a pearl at the end, and not make it look phallic. The second is that, because it is so overbearing on the skyline, it's so prominent – and believe me I had no delusions about the fact that it was going to incite the ire of many of my architectural peers – I did want to try to give it some kind of real character.
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