With the scarcity of land supply, complex high-rise buildings of more than 50 storeys are not uncommon in property developments in Hong Kong in the last ten years. Large and deluxe commercial complex, shopping malls or resident clubhouses are usually built below the tower blocks aiming at maximizing the investment returns and maintaining the cutting edge in the competitive property market from the mindset of developers. Consequently, different structural layouts have to be devised for the upper and lower structures in order to meet the functional requirements. Transfer plates are often employed to separate and transfer the loadings of the tower blocks to the podium structures. Building developments are becoming more complex in terms of technology applied, scale of investment and tight construction schedule. This induces new challenges for construction management and there are needs to refine the complexity of building projects to facilitate construction planning. In this study, the characteristics of building projects are reviewed and studied by using factor analysis. The analysis attempts to re-group the project data into meaningful factors. These variables have been used in previous relevant researches and are analyzed with subjective measurements. On the contrary, an objective approach is used in this research. This study aims at exploring their contributions and interrelationship, and hence classifying and defining the project natures by using the factors devised. The proposed approach in defining building projects enables construction planners to distinguish the differences between building projects from the view of production processes and to improve resources allocation. Copyright © 2010 IAHS.
