The Academic Building Where Addresses Are Lift Numbers — HKUST’s Main Building and Its Layered Numbering Scheme

In one line: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s main Academic Building (ACAD) is a lateral megastructure set into a hillside, spanning over 170,000 m²^※ (developer’s figure, completed 1991). Its spatial logic — which replaces conventional floor numbers with a system of “LG” (Lower Ground) layered levels and uses lift numbers as room addresses — gave rise to Path Advisor, a dedicated indoor navigation tool almost unique among Asian universities, and has profoundly shaped the campus’s wayfinding culture for over three decades.

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# Why was the HKUST campus “built out of a hill”?

HKUST sits on the slopes of the Clear Water Bay peninsula, occupying a site of roughly 60 hectares^※ (whole-campus figure, as of the university’s founding). The campus was carved into a series of stepped terraces cut into the hillside from the very start of construction. Academic facilities are distributed across the upper terraces, while residential and sports facilities occupy the lower terraces closer to the sea^※. Connecting the various terraces is a network of roads, plus covered walkways and lift towers collectively known as the “Bridge Link.” This terrain-following layout meant that HKUST could never take the form of a campus laid out flat across level ground: every building inherently possesses multiple “ground floors,” each relative to a different point on the slope.

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# Who designed this academic building?

The architectural design of HKUST’s Academic Building came from a joint team comprising Simon Kwan & Associates and Percy Thomas Partnership (HK)^※, who were selected as the campus master planners in December 1987^※ (University Archives RG1.2, selection date). Dr Simon Kwan Sin Ming （關善明） was — and remains — an architect, painter, and scholar noted for his pursuit of aesthetic quality; the main campus design later received an “Artistic Creation Award” from the China Academy of Art （中國美術學院）^※ (HKU official biography, award details). The sprawling “super-connected building” that resulted is still one of the largest single university building complexes in Hong Kong by volume.

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# What does 170,000 m² actually mean in terms of scale?

In a paper presented to the international construction research forum CIB W92 by Professor Anthony Walker, then engineering consultant to the project^※, the Academic Building was described as “over 170,000 m² in area, longer than the height of the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong (or the Empire State Building in New York) and far more complex structurally than either” (as completed in 1991). The description captures the building’s defining feature: it is not a tower reaching for the sky, but a horizontal “groundscraper” stretching along the hillside — choosing breadth in three dimensions over vertical stacking.

In terms of construction speed, Phase 1 took roughly 22 months with a contract value of about HK$1 billion, while Phase 2 took around 27 months with a similar contract sum^※ (Walker paper, contract data). Phase 1 encompassed “carpark, sports hall, library, staff canteen, entrance piazza, pedestrian link, atrium, one lecture theatre, Vice-Chancellor’s complex, and part of the academic areas,” and the campus officially opened on 10 October 1991^※. Phase 2 (1990–1993^※, per Archives RG1.2) expanded the building to a capacity of 7,000 students.

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# What does “LG” mean? How many floors does the building actually have?

“LG” stands for “Lower Ground.” This is not quite the same concept as “B” (Basement) in a typical high-rise. Because the Academic Building is built into a slope, different sections of the same structure have different “natural ground” reference points. An LG level is not simply a basement; it is a “ground floor one terrace down” relative to a particular terrace above it. This produces a system that runs from LG1 all the way to LG7^※ (according to the campus guide produced by the HKUST Mainland Students and Scholars Society). At various points, these LG levels interlock with “G/F” (Ground Floor) and standard “1/F, 2/F…” floors to create a composite, three-dimensional numbering scheme.

The distribution of catering outlets offers a compact illustration of how this system works in practice:

The table itself is a miniature “floor map”: from LG1 to LG7, with academic and administrative levels in between, the depth to which this building extends along the hillside goes far beyond any newcomer’s intuitive expectations.

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# “Address by lift”: what logic lies behind the room numbers?

At HKUST, if you ask for the address of an office, the reply will typically take a form like: “Room 5356, take Lifts 13–15.” Or when you search Path Advisor, it will tell you to “Take Lift 22 to 1/F for Lecture Theatre E.” The Campus Management Office’s own official contact address is written as “Room 5356, Main Academic Building, Access via Lifts 13–15”^※ (CMO website, accessed 2026). The lift number is not an annotation — it is part of the address.

This “address by lift” logic has a spatial inevitability to it. Inside the Academic Building, multiple banks of lifts are distributed across different sectors; they are connected across floors but do not all interconnect consistently^※ (exchange-student blog, first-hand account, 2015). When a single building’s horizontal span exceeds the height of a skyscraper, the conventional four-digit “floor-and-room” numbering is no longer enough to disambiguate locations. “Which lift to take” becomes the most direct spatial reference — akin to using a metro station name to locate yourself in a city. The official congregation guidance explicitly states: “Take Lift 19 to 1/F to access the Chia-Wei Woo Academic Concourse”^※ (HKUST Congregation official page, accessed 2026) — the most formal institutional expression of “address by lift.”

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# The Chia-Wei Woo Academic Concourse and the Atrium: the building’s two spatial hubs

The two primary anchors in the “address by lift” system are named public spaces.

The Chia-Wei Woo Academic Concourse （吳家瑋學術廊） is named after HKUST’s founding Vice-Chancellor and President, Professor Chia-Wei Woo (in office 1991–2001)^※. It was named in 2001 in recognition of his significant contribution to the establishment of the university^※ (HKUST official news, naming year). Located on 2/F, the Concourse runs through the core section of the Academic Building. Students use it as the main artery to reach lecture theatres and classrooms^※ (HKUST undergraduate admissions page). Because the Concourse becomes severely congested between classes, some students detour through link bridges in side blocks — an unofficial shortcut colloquially known as the “Skywalk” (HKUST Astronomy Club freshman handbook, 2026, unofficial description).

The Hong Kong Jockey Club Atrium （香港賽馬會大堂） is the other major convergence point within the Academic Building. Part of the Phase 1 works completed in 1991^※ (University Archives RG1.2, timeline), the Atrium is a giant internal courtyard that combines natural daylight with a strong visual focal point, and it features as one of the landmark nodes in the campus virtual tour (campus-vr.ust.hk). The Hong Kong Jockey Club funded this space, continuing its tradition of supporting major educational facilities — the club was in fact the sole funder of HKUST’s original construction^※ (Archives RG1.2, funding details).

Here is a comparison of the two core spaces:

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# “Like a maze”: why Path Advisor was born at HKUST

Is the inside of the Academic Building genuinely labyrinthine? One official-leaning blog post aimed at exchange students put it this way: “The campus is so complex, with all the lift shafts and corridors intersecting each other, often bringing you to the same area — you think you are walking a different path, but you end up at the same spot.”^※ (HKUST Study Abroad Tips, 2015, unofficial but published via a university-linked study-abroad blog). The same post notes that HKUST was “supposedly designed so that all classrooms and buildings are connected to each other.” This “fully connected” design, while convenient, blurs spatial boundaries and makes it difficult for newcomers to build a reliable mental map of the layout.

This real-world need directly spurred the creation of HKUST Path Advisor^※. The system was conceived by Professor Raymond Wong of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering during the 2009–10 academic year, with students building version 1.0 as a final-year project. It was officially rolled out campus-wide in 2010^※ (ITSO official history, launch year). Path Advisor 2.0 went live in 2019^※, introducing a plug-in architecture and experimental indoor positioning functions. The tool later became the subject of academic research — a 2021 VLDB conference paper, “Path Advisor: A Multi-Functional Campus Map Tool for Shortest Path”^※ (Yan et al., 2021), specifically analysed its hybrid indoor–outdoor path-planning algorithm and pointed out that lifts are indispensable nodes within the building’s internal path network; without accounting for them, shortest-path computation between floors would be impossible.

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# The spatial logic of 12 lecture theatres and their lifts

The main Academic Building houses a series of letter-designated lecture theatres — 10 in total, labelled A through H and J through K (skipping I)^※ (Wikipedia, citing HKUST official sources, original main-building count), with the largest seating up to 450 and all equipped with audio-visual facilities^※. The theatres are spread across different floors and sectors of the building, each located by its associated lift bank. Take LTE (Lecture Theatre E): it is located on 1/F, reached by Lift 22^※ (Path Advisor system, query date 2026). The official congregation guidance reinforces the standard format: “Take Lift 19 to 1/F to access the Chia-Wei Woo Academic Concourse.” More recent additions — the Cheng Yu Tung Building (CYT, opened 2015)^※ and the Lee Shau Kee Business Building (LSK, completed 2013) — are independent structures, but both connect into the Academic Building’s link-bridge network and follow the same “lift–floor–room number” wayfinding logic.

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# The spatial costs — and cultural legacy — of a fully connected campus

The “fully connected” design concept of the Academic Building emerged from the intersection of two forces: the practical constraints of a Hong Kong hillside campus, and a spatial ambition entertained by its architects — the idea of a university as a single urban fabric, where one can walk from the laboratory to the library, from the canteen to the lecture theatre, without ever stepping outdoors. This vision has left a legacy on three levels.

On the spatial level: The LG1-to-LG7 numbering scheme is, in effect, an encoded representation of the hillside terrain. Behind each “LG” label lies a terrace, a change in elevation, and a different-angled view of the bay. In their daily vertical rhythm — eat lower down, take classes in the middle, find offices higher up — HKUST students register the topography of Clear Water Bay without being explicitly aware of it.

On the navigational level: The “address by lift” system gave birth to Path Advisor, which has now become far more than a campus app. It doubles as a real-world testbed where HKUST’s computer science faculty and students research indoor path-planning algorithms. The campus itself has turned into a “smart building laboratory” backed by over three decades of spatial data.

On the cultural level: “Which lift are you heading to?” has become HKUST’s own peculiar greeting and a shared spatial reflex. That single sentence is the best gloss on how a building’s spatial logic can be absorbed into the bodily memory of generation after generation of its inhabitants.

Note: The floor numbering, catering locations, lecture theatre lift assignments, and other data in this article reflect the information published in the cited sources at the time of access and are time-sensitive. The layout and facilities of the Academic Building are subject to change as the campus develops; consult the most recent official HKUST publications before citing.

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