Who is he? The 66-year-old Hong Kong native is behind some of the city's most prominent skyscrapers, including Central Plaza and The Center. His company, Dennis Lau & Ng Chun Man Architects & Engineers, was named one of the top 10 architects in Hong Kong in 2008 by construction media group BCI Asia. His portfolio covers Beijing, Taiwan, Thailand and Ukraine. How did he get into architecture? Unsurprisingly, art was Lau's favourite subject at school and he became interested in architecture at about the age of 17, when a building at his school on Kennedy Road was reconstructed. An inquisitive Lau sneaked into the 'dangerous' construction site one day and discovered an intriguing world of red bricks, sticky concrete and toiling workers. Over the course of a year, he visited the site in between classes to follow the construction progress. 'I got to know the workers very well. I would ask them how to do this and that,' Lau says. 'I even knew on which dates they would pour the concrete.' In the 1960s ambitious young people with good grades tended to study medicine or engineering at university but Lau surprised his teachers by choosing to read architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Then what? Lau's career has been closely linked to Hong Kong's economic ups and downs in the past three decades. When he began working at an architectural firm in Central in the late 60s, jobs were scarce because the city was still reeling from the 1967 riots. By 1976, Lau had become the director of a firm that evolved into the company he heads today. In 1983 the economy took another battering, this time from the Sino-British talks on the future of Hong Kong, and Lau was forced to trim a quarter of his staff. 'It was a huge setback. But architects are resilient people. We've been through tough training, so we're quite good at dealing with challenges,' he says. After the crisis, big jobs kept coming Lau's way and that led to a number of award-winning projects, including The Center, Highcliff (right) in Happy Valley and the Beijing New World Centre. What has been his biggest challenge? The first phase of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, completed in the 80s. 'It's a complex that brings under one roof a convention and exhibition centre, a hotel and an office building within a relatively small area. We went to the United States, Britain and Japan to get some experience but all the experts told us our plan was impossible,' Lau says. In the end, he and his team came up with a range of 'Hong Kong-style' solutions, which included a big bespoke lift to transport container trucks to exhibition halls. 'The high density of the complex was a crazy idea in other countries but it works well in Hong Kong,' he says. What is his motto? 'People are the centre. Keeping users of a building happy is the imperative,' Lau says. He doesn't like to stick to a fixed architectural style, believing such an approach would hinder progress. After all, he believes it is wrong to 'build a monument to the architect himself'.