It was thus with an awareness of the importance of both continuity and change that the search for a new headquarters began in the late 1990s.

The Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminal's HACTL2 Building rapidly emerged as a perfect candidate. Completed around 1990, the building was vacated in 1998 when the Hong Kong International Airport moved from Kai Tak to Chek Lap Kok. The building was in good condition and its size, location and extra floor loading satisfied EMSD's basic requirements for its office and workshop accommodations.

The ex-HACTL2 Building was a product of vision, entrepreneurship, creativity and enterprise when it was conceived and designed in the late 1980s. The original building was a response to Hong Kong's emerging role as an international air freight hub. Its completion in the early 1990s bore testimony to an innovative indigenous solution to the challenge of efficient air cargo handling in an extremely limited space. The unique "vertical approach" pioneered by the HACTL team soon won international recognition and emulation in the world's major cities. By 1998, the last year of the building operation as an air cargo terminal, it was handling about half of Hong Kong's annual air cargo throughput and had become a success story world-wide.