As a model village it is spectacular. There are buildings of all shapes and sizes in every direction, a sea with miniature ships, sculpted mountains, even tiny bathers sunning themselves byrooftop pools. Only this is no model.
Alan Campbell and Paul Easton, senior project director and project manager respectively for Schindler Lifts, are standing on the 99th floor of the unfinished International Commerce Centre (ICC), looking down on Hong Kong. They and their installation team have 83 lifts and 37 escalators to install in ICC which, by the time they finish their work in 2010, will serve 118 floors and carry up to 30,000 people a day.
The finished tower will be 490 metres high and the Schindler shuttle lifts connecting the ground to floor 118 will travel at more than 30km/h and complete the journey in under a minute. Those lift shafts will be the longest of any building in the world.
'It's a huge undertaking and because it's so ambitious we're doing things here that no one has done before. It's exciting, but yes, it definitely keeps you on your toes,' Mr Campbell said.
Mr Easton underlined the scope of the challenge. 'There's a lot riding on this for everyone. It's part of our job to worry about everything, and we do. Just working out the wiring diagram was worthy of a PhD, let alone all the technical innovations.'
Simon Kirk, CEO of Jardine Schindler Group, the joint venture between Jardine Matheson and Swiss lift and escalator giant Schindler that is supplying the ICC lift system, believes that the ICC will have an industry impact far beyond its status as a flagship project.
'The lift industry is more than 150 years old, but every couple of decades a major technical breakthrough comes along that enables architects to raise the bar - and the roof - of building design,' Mr Kirk said.