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SCMP Reporter

THE award-winning architect Sir Norman Foster believes the concept of modularisation - the pre-fabrication of components off-site - will speed the construction of the new Chek Lap Kok airport terminal building and bring down the costs.

  And he should know. He is one of the major influences on the design of the $7 billion airport terminal.

  Another of his buildings, the one that brought him to the attention of the world as an architect - the 48-storey Hongkong and Shanghai Bank (HKSB) headquarters in Central - was built using modularisation.

  Construction of the bank proceeded at high speed because it was fabricated with many modular sections bolted together.

  The bank's original programme was accelerated so that it finished three months ahead of its already speeded up programme. This was made possible by a high degree of pre-fabrication, shipped in a series of modules brought in from various locations and assembled on site.

  ''Modularisation has proved its value over and over again,'' he said earlier this month on a visit to Hong Kong with his wife, Lady Sabiha, for the opening of Foster Asia, a regional offshoot of the practice he founded in 1967.

  ''You could not have built the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank in the time it took if you had had to lay one pipe on top of another,'' he said.

  ''All the pipe work, all the risers were modularised; literally delivered overnight and assembled the following day.''     He said the influence of Chinese fung shui had proved important in the positioning of the bank's escalators.

  ''We were very receptive to fung shui ideas and very humble.

  ''It was something that we took seriously, not as a sort of charade. The exact geometry is exactly what the original fung shui man said.

   He told us the entrance should be from that side, and from that specific direction, and that it should be three storeys high.

  ''That was what we were told before we had even drawn a line on any plans,'' he said.

   Although Sir Norman was already established in Britain, the HKSB job helped to make his name abroad, including Japan, where his proposed Millennium Tower awaits finance and construction as the world's tallest building.

  His new practise will act as an umbrella organisation for a series of offices he opened regionally, including Foster Hong Kong, one of three members of a partnership which won the $536-million contract to design the airport terminal at Chek Lap Kok, along with Mott Connell and BAA (formerly the British Airport Authority).

   He said the new terminal would feature a lightweight lattice roof representing flight, which would provide Hong Kong with a very powerful image.

  ''There will be no other airport terminal in the world like it,'' he said.

  ''If you look at a cross-section, it's wafer-thin to scale. It appears to be a dominantly glass building, but it's not all transparent.

  ''Much of it is translucent, and a lot of it is solid back.''   He said the simplicity of the roof's design would enable local contractors to compete successfully for its building against major foreign concerns.

  Speaking later the same day at a lecture he conducted at the Hong Kong University, Sir Norman said Chek Lap Kok was the largest airport in the world.

  ''Its size is really quite mind-boggling,'' he said   The length of the terminal building alone was equal to the distance between the Star Ferry piers in Tsim Sha Tsui and Central, he said.

  By the end of the year 2040, the new airport would be handling more than 35 million passengers a year - the combined annual passenger flow today of Heathrow and John F. Kennedy airports.

 ''This is quite an awesome statistic,'' Sir Norman said.

  He said he and his team had learned lessons from his work on Britain's Stansted airport, and these had been fed back to Chek Lap Kok ''in terms of energy, lighting and flexibility - the way a building might change over time''.

   ''That flexibility has already proved to be a very significant bonus in the evolution of the building so far.''   Sir Norman said the terminal design had proved very adaptable to changes introduced by the Provisional Airport Authority.

   ''Interestingly, as the programme has changed, the original workforce - estimated to be in the order of 13,000 - is now expected to reach around 23,500, which is a third of the size of Hong Kong's construction workforce.

   ''There is no intention that this building is going to be colourless, all-white, grey and silver inside. That is nonsense.

  ''It is going to be brought to life by colour, through the use of warm, natural materials, such as stone, and be bright thanks to the use of glass.''   During his visit to Hong Kong, Sir Norman met with PAA representatives, including the chief executive Hank Townsend.

  ''It is interesting to hear the PAA talking along the same lines,'' he said.

  ''I was tracing the roots of our work in modularisation back to the work we did in Norway, for Fred Olsen in the late 1960s and 1970s.

   ''Our office was doing work for the oil industry on offshore rigs, and demonstrated that, with modularisation, you could package hotel rooms, so you could provide living accommodation on the rigs which were transported in by helicopter.

  ''We used that experience with the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.

   ''At the time, the idea of modularisation was revolutionary,'' he said.



Pre-fab key to early take-off