Parkview Square was designed by the US firm James Adams Design, together with DP Architects of Singapore. It was the last major project by the late C. S. Hwang, a Taiwanese tycoon, who was the founder and chairman of Chyau Fwu Group. The office space on each floor is column-less so it can be reconfigured according to the tenant's wish. Although it is a modern building, having been completed in 2002, it is designed in the classic Art Deco style, inspired by New York City's 1929 Chanin Building. The exterior surface of the building is clad in brown granite, bronze, lacquer, and glass. The lobby is also designed in the Art Deco style and features a 15m-high ceiling with hand-crafted details. The bar in the lobby of the building has a unique 3-storey gin tower housing over a thousand gins. The tower used to hold a wine chiller from which a female bartender dressed as a fairy would retrieve bottles on request by means of a flying wire apparatus. The open plaza of Parkview Square is reminiscent of Piazza San Marco in Venice with sculptures and statues surrounding the open plaza. There are many bronze effigies of some of the most famous figures in world history, including Sun Yat-sen, Abraham Lincoln, Salvador Dalí, Mozart, Chopin, Isaac Newton, Pablo Picasso, Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Winston Churchill and Albert Einstein. The building has widespread use of motifs, sculptures, and ornamentation. The building is guarded by eight gigantic fiberglass statues of men holding a light ball in their hands, four of them standing on each broad side of the building's crown. Gargoyles, which are said to be hand-crafted, decorate the building’s exterior. Locally, the building is often referred to as the Gotham building, due to its Art Deco architectural style that resembles the fictional Gotham City from the Batman series.
Golden crane statue
In the center of the plaza is a statue of a golden crane with its head lifted, pointing towards the direction of Mainland China, its wings in pre-flight mode. On the pedestal, a Chinese poem is written: The poem refers to a mythical crane looking towards the direction of its temple and eager to fly the thousands of miles back — Depicting the homesickness of the owner. The poem also appears as an Easter egg in Original illustration of the Chinese version of StarCraft 2. The statue is supposed to bring wealth to the building.
