Looking beneath the surface of Hong Kong’s architectural landscape
New book traces city’s transformation over the years from a tiny island to a modern urban metropolis
There are those who would knock Hong Kong for steamrolling through the past 50 years of urban development: Charlie Xue Qiuli will have none of it.
The trained architect, City University of Hong Kong professor and author of 12 books on Hong Kong architecture thinks our urban planners and architects have done a decent job of the fishing village-to-urban metropolis transformation, and his latest book, a retrospective of half a century of architecture in Hong Kong, explains why.
“I wanted to fill a gap,” the author says, about Hong Kong Architecture 1945-2015: From Colonial to Global, his fourth book in English (the others are in Chinese). “There are very few English-language books on architecture in Hong Kong, and most of them are by foreign scholars who know the tangible buildings, but they don’t know the internal story.”
This story, as Xue tells it, begins as another chapter in Hong Kong’s history – the Japanese invasion of 1941–1945 – closed. Following liberation by the British, the city was flooded with refugees and a population devastated by war began to swell. People needed housing, and they needed jobs. Mass-construction was the answer to both. Thus began decades of rapid urbanisation, which Xue views as architecture’s equivalent to “crossing the river by touching the stones” (a reference to late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s famous saying, loosely interpreted as learning as you go.)