HONG KONG is incredible. It creates a sense of what New York must have felt like in 1945, or London in 1900 - a city thrilling in its optimism and energy. Hong Kong is a city at the top of its form, where public services, such as subways, actually work and the people look busy and seem to know how to perform their jobs.
For an American, it's a revelation. I'm barely old enough to remember when my own country felt like this, it certainly doesn't anymore. But I'm not a sociologist. I'm an architect and I'm here to visit the architecture school at the Chinese University and study the city.
I am thinking of creating a series of television documentaries on the architecture of Hong Kong and China, after all, this is the world of the future. We are heading into the Pacific century and during the 1990s, half the world's economic growth will occur in Asia.
During the next 25 years, the increase in the number of Chinese living in urban areas will be about a billion. That's the population of 170 cities the size of Boston, my home. It's four times the total population of the United States.
If you decided to house these people in a very austere 100 square feet per person, you would have to build almost 100,000 buildings, each the size of the Bank of China.
Is it possible to create good architecture at such a pace? That's the question. Probably the answer is yes, but only if there is a lot more thought and concern than there seems to be.
By good architecture, I don't necessarily mean works of high architectural art, there are virtually none of these in Hong Kong. But great cities don't require many great buildings - there are few individual buildings of great significance, for example, in Paris. But there are great streetscapes, and those are equally plentiful in Hong Kong. But they seem to be disappearing.
