Kien-k'ang Financial Centre

Kien-k'ang Financial Centre
建康貿金所, kyen-k'ang-mrūs-kra-sqraq
Tower
Record height
Tallest in the world from Jul. 10, 1993 to 2002
Surpassed by	Dayacom World Tower
General information
Status	Complete
Type	Skyscraper
Architectural style	Beaux arts Post-modernism
Address	520 Srūm-gār St. (三河巷)
Town or city	Kien-k'ang
Country	Themiclesia
Current tenants	Samsan Group, Kien-k'ang Equities Trading Commission
Construction started	Jan. 15, 1984
Topped-out	Jul. 10, 1993
Completed	Oc. 5, 1994
Opened	Jan. 1, 1991 (enclosure) Jan. 1, 1995 (tower)
Cost	$1,980,000,000
Owner	Land Bank of Kien-k'ang
Height	504 m
Technical details
Floor count	101
Floor area	412,500 m²
Lifts/elevators	61
Design and construction
Architecture firm	Pastuk & Sons Creative Union & Sons & Company
Developer	United Development Consortium
Structural engineer	Ilmari Trar Tomoyuki Iekami
Main contractor	Pap & Nyil Construction Work

The Kien-k'ang Financial Centre (Shinasthana: 建康貿賈所, kyan-k′ang-krem-mrus-sqraq; abbrev. KKFC) is a supertall skyscraper designed by architectural firms Creative Union & Co. and Pastuk & Sons & Co., located in Kien-k'ang, Themiclesia. This building was officially recognized as the world's tallest building from its topping out in Jul. 10, 1993 until 2002, when it was surpassed at the topping out the Dayacom World Tower, almost twice its height. It opened on Jan. 1, 1995 Costing $1.59 billion in 1984 (circa $4 billion in 2020 dollars), it was also the most expensive skyscraper built to date. Originally planned for 1992, its completion was delayed by two years by the planning inspection and Construction Workers' Strike of 1991.

KKFC has two principal parts, the tower and the enclosure. The tower consists of 101 stories above ground and 8 below, and is served by 61 elevators, 40 of which are capable of high-speed operations at up to 40 km/h and rapid acceleration, gaining world records in both. The enclosure, 7 storeys above ground, is designed as commercial space and accommodates department stores, boutiques, and restaurants. KKFC incorporates architectural elements familiar to the streetscape of the Gate District for the enclosure section and implemented a postmodern interpretation of those elements in the tower's exterior. The buildings incorporate several technical features to overcome challenges encountered in both construction and maintenance, including a difficult foundation, high winds, and potential earthquakes.

Since completion, it is operated by the Kakw Corporation and houses offices of a number of international and domestic corporations and the trading floor of the Kien-k'ang Equities Market. At the base of a building is a shopping centre with fashion boutiques and restaurants. It is served by integrated bus bays, tram stops, and metro rail station. Breezeways connect it to surrounding buildings and the Twa-ts'uk-men Station. During its construction and opening, it was subject of much anticipation, and in some circles it is viewed as a symbol of economic recovery in the 90s. However, it has also been subject to bomb threats several times, resulting in evacuations, though no actual incident has occurred. During the 2003 attack on Tjo-tsjakw-men Station, the building was evacuated for three months.

History

Planning and design (1970 – 1983)

The KKFC, as the world's tallest building, was the result of a long string of competing designs and redesigns to a building project that was originally much more modest, first concretely proposed in 1971. In the early 70s, the area around the KKFC was already a bustling commercial area, being dominated by the Twa-ts'uk-men Station and more than a dozen department stores. This area was exceptionally busy because nearly half a million people commuted through the transport hubs in or around the station. Due to the geology of the area, the city forbade the erection of buildings there more than seven stories tall, and this remains the height limit for most of the area. It was therefore a highly saturated area where new developments were few and far between.

However, investors saw an opportunity when the Twa-ts′uk-men Marshalling Yard was finally removed in 1971 after almost 40 years of delay by National Rail, which relied on the yard to support commuter trains arriving and departing rapidly from the central station at rush hour. The completion of the underground storage tracks of the Inner Region Regional Railway alleviated the need for the above-ground yard, and the City quickly decided to make the land available for a large development. The initial consortium was therefore formed in 1970, backed by multiple banks, and hired Pastuk & Sons to build a tower that would be both useful and monumental for the area. The firm's initial proposal in 1971 called for an office tower of 35 storeys.

The City objected to the building of a pure office tower in this location, believing it made no improvement to the urban environment; in response, Pastuk & Sons decided to convert the first four storeys of the tower to a department store, just like several others in the area. In turn, the consortium found that this conversion reduced the office space available, which also caused consternation with the banks. The architects responded to this problem by making the tower even taller, adding 10 storeys to make the total height 45. This plan was finalized in 1975 and sent to the city for approval, but an election had intervened in 1974 and precipitated a change of leadership. The new council called for new bids, resolving that it would not make exceptions to building regulations unless presented with options.

To this, another consortium with its backers hired Creative Union & Sons to present an alternate vision for the site, which incorporated green space around a 50-storey building, to which was attached a 5-storey department store. In 1976, the City found that the new tower did not have enough parking space and asked Creative Union to provide such a large lot that the sore shortage of parking space around the area would be alleviated. Creative Union presented the city with a surface parking tower in the brutalist style that was eight storeys tall, but the City rejected this design as a councillor, Lord Mit, called it "well and truly repulsive".

Learning of this spurn, Pastuk very rapidly reworked its tower to include an underground parking space that was five levels in height, an unprecedented design. However, the parking space would be very expensive as it meant the tower's foundation would have to be laid even deeper into the ground, and on these grounds it received assuranes from the city that it would be allowed to build another 10 storeys above its existing but stalled 45-storey design, but the redesign work on this addition would also consume several months as Creative Union neared an acceptable revision of its plans as well.

In January 1978, the City proposed the yard site could be divided into two, allowing both towers to be built. This plan was received with jubilation by both consortia but was opposed by other council members, who were concerned that the building of two towers of roughly equal height would fail the city's desire for an iconic, monumental building. The Baronetess Krar wrote that "the key importance of monumental architecture is uniqueness, not sheer size; duplication make monuments ordinary and cheapens it. Having one tower makes it a monument contrasting and complementing the historic atmosphere of Gate District; having two means the rest of Gate District is awaiting redevelopment into towers."

In 1979, the backers of the two consortia, which were financially worn out due to the protracted planning work, pressured each other to merge the project under a single consortium. There were several factors that contributed to the merger, not less the City's own lack of patience for the slow redesig work that occurred with the rejection of each iteration. Pastuk later recounted that, with a project of this magnitude, major structural alterations essentially required a complete redrawing to ensure structural soundness, and with this came the work of redoing all electrical, plumbing, and interior work. The increasing height of the building also required a broader financial basis, encouraging the backers to ally with each other to see to the project's eventual realization. Architecturally, co-operation between two architectural firms could have and did result in conflicts, though "their combined strengths were indispensible to the quality of the eventual product".

The merger of the consortia took place in late 1979, and a draft with the support of the united consortium, which required a grand total of 72 storeys to meet the city's demands for public space and parking facility, and satisfy the expected revenues of creditors, was proposed in 1981. This penultimate draft was, ironically, rejected for not being ambitious enough: the incumbent city leadership, citing delay and public anticipation and frustration, came to view the project not merely as a large development, but as one to "have international primacy". With interest redoubling in what was envisioned the world's tallest tower, the project was redesigned for an ninth and final time to include 101 total storeys and a seven-storey department store for public amenity. The finished draft was approved by the City in 1983.

Since completion (1994 – )

The tower topped out in mid-1993 and was declared complete in late 1994, with inspection work concurrent with finishing carpentry, electrical, plumbing, and painting work. The then prime minister of Dayashina Otoya Endo congratulated the architectural team for the KKFC's historic undertaking, which at the cost of $2 billion at completion was the most expensive building project (with published and verifiable expenditures) in human history. With a total architectural height of 508 m, it replaced the Palace of the Soviets in Reberiya, standing at 495 m, as the world's tallest building. Tenants began to move into the building in November 1994, in phases as the finishing crews moved from one part of the building to another.

According to Nathan Rik, the principal architect at the time of the building's completion, the Palace of the Soviets was challenging to surpass because it was topped by a 100-metre statue, which contain no occupiable space, whereas an office tower like KKFC must, by virtue of its intended purpose, have both occupiable and useful space near its top. Thus while the KKFC's total archictectural height surpassed its predecessor by only 13 m, the highest occupiable level surpassed the Palace of the Soviets by a considerably larger margin. To date, while the KKFC has fallen out of the top 10 tallest buildings in the world, by highest occupiable floor it remains within the top 10.

On Jan. 1, 1995, the Themiclesian prime minister Lord De (祉君) opened the tower in a highly-publicized ceremony. Describing the tower as the cumulation of 30 years of development work (planning had started for the site in the 60s), he further embellished the tower as a fitting tribute to an entire generation's effort towards mutual support and respect to differences, "at the more abstract level". But by this time, parts of the tower had been operational for some weeks, while others were still vacant.

Architecture

The architecture of the KKFC was tightly overseen by the City as it required a special planning permission to construct. In general, the City wished to see that the building could blend into the streetscape that rarely rose above 20 m, which was the building height limit of the city's older districts. The architects who worked on the building took this instruction to mean that the building's great vertical height should not be overly emphasized. To this effect, they employed notable horizontal elements and repeating themes in the vertical direction, so that the building could be seen as a "stack of shorter buildings".

Form

The KKFC's architectural profile is generally given as "Late Modernism", which emphasized an identity between form and function and a "simplicity of design" manifesting as utilitarian structures given minimal ornamentation. The exterior architect of the building, Martha Ret, provided that a building should be "comprehensible", in the sense that "everything visible should have an instantly-recognizable function that contributes to the building's structure, which conforms to its function." She believed that the human mind finds beauty in rationalism in design and does not like "superfluity, regardless of its aesthetic appeal". To this end her exterior designs gave primacy to the pillars that supported the building and the horizontal beams that held up the floors and eschewed "curiosities that time will wear away".

It is neither spheroid nor tauroid nor any number of such shapes that some have proposed to build on this site. Looking at the environs on the street, we believe these shapes would be out of place and out of line, and they would not be a compliment to the context in which this building is situated. The building that we have is sensible and sensitive to the environment, expectations, and requirements. It is as much a monument as a practical, familiar, and approchable office tower.

The KKFC contains very little vanity height, the designers of the building having decided that it would be ostentatious and disharmonious with the generally restrained architecture of the surroundings. To reduce costs and still achieve a great height, the ceiling height was increased from the planned 3.5 to 4 m, such that each storey would have a total height of about 5 m. This resulted in a spacious interior that critics generally received positively, one speaking of a "palatial" atmosphere and another of a "return to the offices of the late 19th century, with their tall ceilings".

Coloration

The general colour of the building is a dark turquoise, with slightly yellow sandstone facings. The turquoise colour was chosen by the city to reflect that of the sky, such that it would not "cut through the sky" as much.

Notable staff

To accelerate the building's design, the two consortia that originally competed with each other for the City's site merged in 1979 and worked concurrently. In this effort, the team from Creative Union & Sons included by Tomoyuki Iekami, a Dayashinese architect who first joined the firm in 1980 as an understudy to Ilmari Trar, who superintended the project from 1976 to 1986, and soon became a leading member charged with key structure and design work. Tomoyuki developed a reputation for dedication and the rigorous, exacting quality of work. After his involvement with the KKFC, he established his own practice in Dayashina and was since responsible for the design of five of the ten tallest buildings in the world, all of which have surpassed the KKFC in height. His co-partner, Tep-pi Pyer, said that Tomoyuki "found reward in his hard and persevering work to realize one of the most tortured projects in the history of his profession."

Facilities

Peace Memorial Clock Tower

The Peace Memorial Clock Tower, with a height of 60 m, looks like a scaled-down version of the main tower and abuts the western end of the enclosure's north wing. Its top contains a gigantic digital clock display that shows the time of day. The interior of the clock tower is dedicated to the citizens of Kien-k'ang who defended the capital city against Menghean, Dayashinese. and Dzhungestani invaders during the Battle of Kien-k'ang of 1940 – 41. A number of artifacts from that time are permanently on display in the facility. The tower was donated by the City Council in 1978 to emphasize the KKFC as a space with public significance and acknowledge the fact that its site was one of the most contested and casualty-laden battlefields in the Pan-Septentrion War.

Enclosure

The KKFC's enclosure was a development of the plan to include a department store as public amenity in the tower's earlier iterations. The enclosure as built has two wings that extend westwards from the main tower, and the northern wing ends with the Peace Memorial Clock Tower. Both wings currently host a number of fashion boutiques, encompassing clothing, accessories, jewellery, perfumes, timepieces, etc.

The northern wing is the longer of the two and contains 122 storefronts.

Tower

The tower portion of the building consisted of 101 above-ground levels, of which the 2nd through 99th levels are offices.  The 100th level contains the premises of an exclusive club called the 100th Level Club, and the 101th level is the public observation level. Underground, the first level contains a food court, and below this the parking facilities share ingress and egress with that of the enclosure. The bottom storey contains certain mechanical and maintenance systems that is normally not open to the public. There are a total of 7 underground levels.

Lobby

The lobby of the tower has an elevated ceiling height of 6 m and serves as a reception area for the tower.

The tower was fully open to the public until the 2015 burglary incident, after which the managing corporation required all individuals who entered the tower to register. This registration could be permanent, for individuals who either worked at or regularly visited the tower, or temporary, in case of occasional visitors.

L'wats Stock Exchange

Main article: L'wats Stock Exchange

The L'wats Stock Exchange is the main securities market in Themiclesia and, by market capitalization of its listed companies, is the 7th largest stock exchange in the world. The Stock Exchange occupies the second through sixth levels, with a large, two-storey tall trading floor. The fourth through sixth levels are offices and lounges for traders at the exchange.

Level	Designated use	Occupants and uses
P5	Service	Water purification, mechanical facilities (not open to public)
P4	Public parking	Long-term or rental
P3
P2		Hourly
P1
M	Department store	Chibo's Grill, MacDonald's
G		Fashion boutiques
1	Reception, Starbox, connection to Urban Line
2	L'wats Stock Exchange	Trading floor
3
4		Offices
5
6
7	Management office
8
9	Offices
10
11	Service
12	Offices
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21	Service
22	Offices
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31	Service
32	Offices
33
34
35	Sky lobby
36
37	Offices
38
39
40
41	Service
42	Offices
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51	Service
52	Offices
53
54
55
56
57
58
59	Sky lobby
60
61	Service
62	Offices
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71	Service
72	Offices
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81	Service
82	Offices
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91	Service
92	Offices
93
94
95
96
97	Communications
98
99
100	100th Level Club
101	Observation deck, Jewel of the Sky (restaurant), Souvenir
RF	Communications

Building security

Most Themiclesian office towers with multiple tenants do not have building security, and building receptionists where present were tasked with guiding visitors to the correct floor or contacting individuals in the building (prior to the advent of cellular phones). Some office buildings also have mail clerks for sorting incoming and outgoing mail, if they were received and collected together. Office towers used by a single company, to the contrary, may have security measures around the building to some degree, though this is also uncommon. The KKFC when first completed was also like this, and visitors could freely navigate the building without a pass; individual tenants registered their workers and visitors at the doors to their offices or suites.

In late 2015, building management established a security perimeter around the office tower to prevent armed individuals from entering. Individuals entering the building from that time needed a pass or an appointment with a tenant, and suitcases and large bags were banned unless first inspected by the reception desk. With regard for sensitive information, the checking process is done in a private room, and the visitor will have access to opaque envelopes to package any sensitive materials prior to inspection. The visitor will not need to open opaque envelopes, but receptionists are allowed to look at and feel the envelopes to make sure there are no weapons. If a suspicious envelope is found, the visitor can enter the building without it and leave it in a storage room, where it is tagged and returned to the visitor at departure. On the other hand, if a visitor has a chaperone with a pass, they do not need appointments and their personal effects will not be inspected.

However, this level of security, which some consider excessive, has also been found wanting. In November 2018, Sandra Maramatha complained that a strange man was admitted to the building wearing a pass purporting to be Alri Tarrac, a manager at Hinata Bank, which was located on a different floor. The man was seen in the office for several hours and eventually spied on the contents of her computer, moved her desk, and attached strange sticky notes to her cubicle. Hinata Bank strictly denied any relation to the incident and stated that they had no employee named "Alri Tarrac" and that it had never issued that particular pass at all. The man was later found to be Patrick Matty, who was mentally ill and sought to communicate with his deceased fiancée by approaching Maramatha, who resembled her.

Incidents

2014 burglary

Satsuma, a jewellery located in the ground floor of the KKFC mall, was subject to a burglary in the night of Sep. 1, 2014, when the mall had been cleared. An estimated $7.1 million worth of diamonds and finished jewellery were carried off by the burglars. The burglary was not detected until the following morning, as the alarm system was not tripped. As the loss had been insured, Satsuma was able to recover the full amount from Allied Insurance Group.

2015 armed intrusion

On March 18, 2015, a group of armed intruders entered the building with unclear intensions. At the time the building was fully open to the public, and visitors were neither required to register nor have their bags checked. They then entered the 24th floor office of Clipper Inc. and demanded to see the general manager of the company's operation in Themiclesia, while showing their weapons. As the manager was absent, they were persuaded to leave on the promise that the police would not be called. But as their elevator left the floor, an employee forced open the door to the shaft, causing the elevator to suspend operation automatically (as a safety precaution) and trap the intruders. The police were called, taking the intruders into custody.

The matter was investigated by the police, and published statements claim that the intruders were hired by one of Clipper's competitors to "persuade" the manager to alter Clipper's local strategies. The intruders stated that they had never been instructed to open fire on anyone in the building, and as such their weapons were not loaded. Additionally, no ammunition was found on their persons or their effects. Nevertheless, they were found guilty in the Supreme Court of an illegal entry intending to commit a crime and of causing a breach of the peace, and were sentenced to two to four years in prison, depending on their roles in the group.

See also

• List of tallest buildings in Septentrion