Ten consortia last week submitted bids to masterplan a £500m-plus expansion of Hong Kong’s £12bn Chek Lap Kok airport as construction booms again in the Far East.
UK civil engineers Maunsell, Scott Wilson and Mott Connell, the Hong Kong arm of Mott MacDonald, are understood to be on teams bidding for the project.
The expansion of the airport is just one of the projects fuelling a new construction boom in Hong Kong. Others include:
- The £2bn Disneyland Hong Kong
- Cyberport, a £1bn high-tech business park
- Six new railway lines worth £8.3bn
- The ongoing £2.3bn East and West Rail projects. A string of mixed-use developments above new stations on these lines are expected to be worth about £300m each.
Also planned are two new bridges: the £450m, cable-stayed Stonecutters Bridge, which stretches 1000 m across the Rambler Channel, and the £700m, 1418 m Tsing Lung suspension bridge across the Ma Wan Channel. Both are part of two new road schemes worth £4bn.
The winner of the Chek Lap Kok project will be announced in September. The contract will revise the original 1991 masterplan for expansion of the airport, which was to deal with the rapidly increasing volume of passengers and cargo.
At the moment, the airport handles 32 million passengers a year – a figure that is increasing at 11% annually – as well as 2.2 million tonnes of cargo.
The nine-month masterplanning exercise could include a new cargo handling centre, a second terminal, a commercial development incorporating new hotels and a convention centre, and a possible land reclamation project.
The area for the masterplan covers 130 ha of the 1250 ha man-made island.
In the original masterplan, a “mirror image” extension of the bird-shaped, 550 000 m2 Foster and Partners-designed passenger terminal was planned for an adjacent 40 ha site.
However, US consultancy Skidmore Owings Merrill is currently doing a feasibility study on a possible change of use to commercial development, such as a convention centre.
SOM’s conclusions will feed into the new masterplan.
A spokesperson for the Hong Kong Airports Authority said the new passenger terminal may be
one building or “a cluster of buildings”. The other development site is a 90 ha “midfield” area in the middle of the island.
The Disney development is set to be built on the island of Lantau.
