Hong Kong doesn't do subtlety. But at 8 Castle Road, where The Legacy's twin residential towers have just risen 198m above Mid-Levels West, ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel has delivered something unexpected: monumentality with restraint, density with breathing room.
When Citterio and Viel first visited the site in the mid-2010s, they saw fragmentation – a steep hillside scattered with looming buildings facing every which way. ‘The idea of creating two rigorously designed towers was meant to bring a sense of order,’ Citterio explains. That rigour manifests in an asymmetric composition of two glass-and-bronze volumes that rise like mismatched wings from a single stone podium, their orientation choreographed to maximise views, ventilation, and privacy.
Explore The Legacy by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel
Viel is emphatic about the towers' dual façades. ‘We designed both the bay-facing and hill-facing façades to be distinctive, treating them both as refined frontages.’ It’s a pointed riposte to a city where buildings often present one ambitious face to the harbour and shrug at everything else.
The façades’ reflective dark grey glazing – chosen for thermal performance – reads as unexpectedly urbane. ‘It's clearly not an office building, as the balconies express its residential character,’ Viel notes, ‘yet it remains very different from any other residential tower.' Those balconies are operable elements in a climate-responsive envelope engineered to withstand typhoons while allowing natural ventilation. Corner windows, achieved through what Citterio describes as ‘a very complex structural exercise’, eliminate vertical mullions entirely, offering unobstructed panoramas.
Below, the podium is clad in Aspen white granite cut with deep articulation, a nod to the retaining walls that have historically anchored Hong Kong's bristling hillside development. ‘Over time, thanks to the effect of the local environment, the podium will take on a rock-like quality,' Citterio observes, imagining a building that ages into its context rather than against it.
Arrival sequences matter in a city where simply getting home can feel like an ordeal. Here, The Legacy’s design separates vehicular access from pedestrian entry across five distinct points on Castle Road and Seymour Road. Landscape design by Parcnouveau reinforces this urban generosity, creating what Viel calls ‘a new quality to urban context in which the towers connect with the city rather than simply landing on the ground’.
By all accounts, the developers – Henderson Land and New World Development – tapped ACPV Architects in part for its European fluency in blending hospitality sensibilities with residential programming, then still novel in Hong Kong.
Ten years on, that foresight proves prescient in its intersection of social and architectural nuances. As Citterio notes, 'These large-scale buildings are like small cities, and I hope that the shared spaces help create a sense of community and solidarity among people.'
In a metropolis as dense and, paradoxically, introverted as Hong Kong, that ambition might be The Legacy's most radical proposition.