One man’s property brochure collection offers a window on Hong Kong’s architectural history
Alfred Ho keeps a forgotten aspect of the city’s housing market alive, and shines a light on how developers constantly adapt to maximise profit
It’s hard to tell now from the building’s inconspicuous look, with its paint peeling and dozens of air conditioning units jutting out from its beige walls, but Grandview Building in Mong Kok was once a highly sought-after residential property when it hit the market in 1978.
“Grandview Building is especially equipped with two high-speed, luxurious Toshiba elevators that move 350 feet per minute,” a description from a vintage brochure read. “Jump on and off conveniently; no hassle, no waiting.”
It is just one of the examples in a rare collection of over 3,000 home sales brochures printed since the 1970s that offer a glimpse of how Hong Kong’s buildings and neighbourhoods were built and formed over the past four decades.
The brochures, once a handy reference for architects to compare designs from competitors, became increasingly obsolete when a law in 2013 required all brochures to be available online, meaning architecture firms had no use in collecting them physically anymore.
“If I didn’t take them in, all this information about how people used to describe different parts of the city, and the buildings, would be lost,” said architect Alfred Ho Shahng Herng, who spent ten days lugging at least 30 sacks full of brochures to storage facilities and hopes to build a database for the public to access.