Striving for Excellence in Building Services

Our Daniel and Mayce Yue Research Building has won the Excellent Design Framework Award at the Excellent Building Award 2026 organized by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers (Building Services Division). The Award is a platform to showcase the building projects and their building services adopted to achieve their outstanding performance in the past three years, and our Building has exemplified holistic sustainability in design, construction, and operations.

The design adopts a sustainability-led approach, beginning with passive architectural strategies to reduce the building’s cooling demand. The envelope performance is carefully enhanced to limit solar heat gain and improve thermal efficiency, thereby lowering reliance on mechanical cooling at source. This passive foundation is then strengthened by active building services engineering innovations, creating a balanced and high-performance solution for a complex laboratory building.

A key feature is the distributed district cooling system, which operates in coordination with another nearby distributed district cooling system to serve six buildings. This shared infrastructure improves overall energy efficiency, enhances system resilience and supports campus-wide decarbonisation. The system is further optimized through AI-based control to improve operational performance and responsiveness under varying demand conditions. The building also adopts a low-temperature chilled ceiling system, offering a more advanced and energy-efficient approach to thermal comfort in office areas, while cascade ventilation reuses conditioned air to reduce energy use between zones.

The project further incorporates substantial energy and water recovery measures. Heat recovery wheels reduce conditioning loads by reclaiming exhaust air energy, while condensate recovery and reuse of cooling tower bleed-off water for flushing reduce water consumption and support resource conservation. Demand control is extensively applied throughout the building, including innovative strategies that carefully balance energy management with safety in laboratory areas. In parallel, extensive rooftop solar photovoltaic panels and EV charging facilities support low-carbon energy generation and sustainable mobility across the campus.