The new wide-span bridge, with self-cleansing piers, will measure 1,360 ft. It will have eight 140 ft. intermediate spans and two 120 ft. spans. Spans in the old bridge were only 40 ft. which was not wide enough for debris flowing downstream in a major flood. It was this pile up of debris that finally sheared sections of the bridge. The new bridge is schedlued for completion by the end of 1972.
Bank to rebuild on Hong Kong site
The First National City Bank in Queen's Road Central - with its columned frontage a Hong Kong landmark for more than 40 years is to be de- molished and replaced by a 16-storey circular tower building.
Tenders are about to be invited for the sub- structure work, demolition will begin in May and
First National new bank
bids for the superstruc- ture will be invited in September this year. The new HK$15 mil- lion building is expect- ed to be completed in mid-1973.
The corner site be- tween Ice House Street and Duddell Street has historic associations. Before the present bank was built in 1931 it housed the Hong- kong Telephone Co.'s Central exchange and before that, in 1910, the Grand Hotel.
With its curved cur- tain walls of tinted glass in anodised alu- minium frames, the new building will give a more open impression to the area. It will oc- cupy 62 per cent of the site and will have landscaped terraces at the rear at several levels. Service core walls and tower
tower co- lumns will be finished in marble.
The main lift lobby of the office tower will be accessible by escalators from Duddell Street and Ice House Street through a multi-level landscaped entry foyer. Three lifts will serve the upper floors from the foyer level and a fourth lift will indepen- dently serve floors occupied by the bank.
Typical office floors will consist of a rectan- gular service core housing lifts, staircases, toilets
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and utility areas at the rear of the building and will provide 3,000 sq.ft. of column-free office space in the circular tower portion fronting Queen's Road. The architects are engineers are Wong & Tung & Associates.
Computer program package offered
A computer program package is to be made available throughout S.E. Asia in May. Stuctural Computing Services, Hong Kong, will offer an ABCD (automated building computer design) pro- gram for the analysis and design of multi-storey planar frames in concrete.
A feature of the system is that it enables the engineer to design the entire structure at one time, with one set of data input, thus eliminating the external manipulation of intermediate results. The frame may have prismatic or nonprismatic mem- bers, fixed or hinged supports and concentrated or distributed loads.
There are several loading combinations, one of which automatically places the live load in the spans to produce maximum moments and then combines the results with a wind analysis, reversing wind direction if necessary, to generate combined maximums. The system also includes provision for entering column live load reduction factors and out of plane moments for use during the design phase.
ABCD provides for the design of reinforced concrete beams, flat plate floor slabs, shear walls with or without openings, spread footings and pile caps. The user may optionally control the design of elements by specifying some of the cross-section parameters or, alternatively, by placing upper and lower bounds on these parameters.
The system gives both working stress and ul- timate strength procedures for concrete design and observes the latest provisions of the British Stan- dard Code of Practice and/or ACI Specifications. The proportioning procedure takes into account bi-axial bending for columns, and flexure, shear and flexural bond criteria for beams and slabs.
Output consists of cross-section dimensions and principal longitudinal reinforcement (size, number and length) at the critical design sections. The programme automatically completes the design as required and then uses the basic design features to arrive at a quantity estimate for the key items such as concrete and reinforcing steel
Tenders for Stanley flats
Tenders will be invited next month for building three separate blocks of three-storey flats on an 80,000 sq.ft. site at the junction of Stanley Village Road and Stanley Beach Road. Being carried out for the Hongkong Land Investment & Agency Co. Ltd., the project is estimated to cost HK$10 mil- lion.
The blocks will surround a large garden court-
Far East BUILDER, March 1971
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