A great population explosion combined with an acute shortage of building sites have led to intense high-rise building development in the urban areas of Hong Kong. Fig 1 typifies this sort of development and shows a 20-storey block of domestic apartments carried on reinforced concrete walls of slip-form construction. The walls are partly supported at second-floor level on three reinforced-concrete transfer beams BI, B2 and B3, each of which is supported at one end by columns Cl; C2 and C3 respectively. These columns are offset from the upper walls to provide ready access to the two storeys of car-parking located beneath the apartments and are, in turn, carried on caissons at a lower level.
S. Mackey and Thomas K.C. Wan