Immigration Tower is a skyscraper located in the Wan Chai District of Hong Kong completed in 1990. The tower rises 49 floors and 181 metres (594 ft) in height. Immigration Tower, which stands as the 93rd-tallest building in Hong Kong, is composed entirely of office space. The building houses government offices, principally those of the Immigration Department.
Design Immigration Tower is part of a three-tower complex of government offices surrounding the Gloucester Road Garden. The other two towers are the Wanchai Tower and the Revenue Tower. These government buildings were designed by the Architectural Services Department for the Government Property Agency. The Revenue Tower is nearly identical in design to the Immigration Tower. Most of the floors in the Immigration Tower are designed as open plan offices, which increases flexibility for tenants. For these floors, the usable floor area is as much as 80% of the gross floor area. The tower incorporates a sky lobby on the 38th storey to facilitate vertical transportation. The building is linked to Wan Chai station by a long footbridge, and so there are entrances and lobbies at both the ground level and the first floor. The dominant tenant is the Immigration Department, and the building is heavily visited by members of the public who rely on the department for the issuance of Hong Kong identity cards and all types of visa. The lowest levels of the tower are thus served by escalators in order to accommodate the high patronage of the services found there. The Immigration Department maintains several unique facilities in the building. A restricted vault holds a collection of volumes dating back to 1873 which records in detail the births and deaths over the years, including information such as the occupation of new fathers or the causes of deaths. The oldest extant marriage registry is from 1945, as earlier volumes were lost during World War II. The department also maintains a small detention facility on the 13th floor. There is a giant Philips advertisement on the roof, facing Kowloon, publicised in 2007 as the largest LED display panel in Hong Kong.
History
Opening Immigration Tower opened on 22 January 1990. The tower was built as part of a large government development on an 18,500 square metre site within the Wan Chai reclamation. The tower was originally known as Wanchai Tower II (灣仔政府綜合大樓第二座), following its earlier neighbour, the Wanchai Tower. Likewise, the Revenue Tower was originally known as Wanchai Tower III. In addition to the government offices the overall development also included a garden and a fire station. In 1989, the commissioning of Immigration Tower was expected to achieve annual rental savings of $46.8 million for the government. The Immigration Department previously occupied 13 storeys of Mirror Tower in Tsim Sha Tsui East. The Chinese name of Immigration Tower changed from "人民入境事務大樓" to "入境事務大樓" when the Chinese name of the Immigration Department changed upon the 1997 handover of sovereignty from Britain.
Curtain wall failure The glass curtain wall facade has suffered several failures during inclement weather. The building lost 40–50 sheets of glass during a 1994 typhoon. During Typhoon York in 1999, the tower and its twin, the Revenue Tower, together saw more than 370 panes of glass shatter. After this incident, the Architectural Services Department defended the standards of government building design and maintenance, stating that wind load tests for the curtain wall systems of the Immigration and Revenue towers were duly carried out in Florida, that the curtain walls met the wind load requirements of the Buildings Ordinance, and that the incident was an isolated occurrence caused by the strongest typhoon to hit Hong Kong in 16 years.
1996 passport rush In early 1996, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers who did not already hold British passports rushed to Immigration Tower to apply for British Dependent Territories citizenship in order to acquire British National (Overseas) passports later on. The cut-off date for British naturalisation was midnight on Sunday, 30 March 1996. More than 700 immigration officers worked throughout the final weekend, round the clock, processing 3,000 applications per hour. The massive queues were made worse by China's hardening stance toward Hong Kong, with Beijing announcing it would dismantle Hong Kong's democratic institutions following the handover, as well as the recent Chinese missile launches near Taiwan that Beijing admitted were intended to undermine the 1996 Taiwanese democratic presidential elections. Many Hong Kongers were thus prompted to acquire the BNO passport as a form of insurance amid rising uncertainty in Hong Kong's future. The Immigration Department announced that anyone who reached the queue before Sunday at midnight would be allowed to apply. That night, a queue of nearly 60,000 snaked from Immigration Tower to Wan Chai Sports Ground, which the government hired to accommodate the crowd. Numerous fistfights broke out.
2000 accidental fire The tower suffered an accidental fire in March 2000 which began in a ground-floor transformer room and burned for two hours, spreading smoke as high as the 39th storey, and injuring one person.
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