Heritage fate tied to famous faces
Grading of nurses' quarters not just based on design, says expert
Whether Queen Mary Hospital's nurses' quarters should be graded as a historic building depends not only on its structure, but also on whether it has any important stories attached to it, a conservation expert says.
Lee Ho-yin, director of the University of Hong Kong's architectural conservation programme, said the building, constructed in 1936, is a derivative of the neoclassical style known as stripped classicism.
The style, favoured by the Nazis, is characterised by a classical design reduced to its structural elements, with much of the ornamentation either taken away or subtly implied.
The old Wan Chai Police Station, built in 1932, is of the same style.
The five-storey nurses' quarters opened in December 1936, four months before the hospital's official opening. It was turned into overnight accommodation for female medical staff after the nursing school was closed in 2001, and is having its heritage value assessed.
The 1,400-bed hospital wants to demolish the quarters and build a trauma and cardiac centre on the site. The Hospital Authority had planned to start the project this financial year and have it completed by 2012-2013. But the plan has been put on hold after medical staff called for the building's conservation.
The Hospital Authority has asked the Architectural Services Department to investigate the site, and the department will in turn hire a consultant to conduct the assessment.
Professor Lee said he could not say at this stage whether the nurses' quarters should be graded.
'The heritage impact assessment has to find out if some important and famous people have stayed at the quarters, and if it carries a very special value to the development of Queen Mary Hospital.'
He said the assessment also has to find out whether buildings of the stripped classicism style were rare in Hong Kong.
'To my understanding, there are only a few examples of such buildings left in Hong Kong.'
He said neoclassicism in architecture, also known as the classical revival, or Greek revival style, was a trend that lasted until the 1920s. As time went by, the style became less decorative.
'By the 1930s it evolved into a style so austere in appearance that it acquired a new name as stripped classicism, which is essentially neoclassicism with all the decorative details stripped away.'
Professor Lee said there were many factors contributing to the development of the style, among which was the Great Depression that began in 1928 and lasted well into the 1930s, which led buildings to become less decorative and therefore more economical to build.
He said Italy's Fascist government and Germany's Nazi administration particularly took to stripped classicism in the development of national approaches to architecture, and the chief Nazi architect, Albert Speer, helped propagate an even more austere version of the approach.
