“Building on Disappearance” comments on the state of preservation and describes the disappearance of heritage buildings and as a result, the disappearance of history and culture.
The writer criticises difference cases of building conservation in Hong Kong, from keeping the clock tower and flagstaff house without preserving the former usage and history of the building itself, to the case of the Repulse Bay Hotel, where the original building is not even kept, and is replaced by a movie set that imitates the original hotel. It seems like Hong Kong has a tendency to ‘taxidermise’ historic sites, where the structure itself is kept but nothing else remains, and the architecture merely serves as a monument for you to gaze upon. Murray Building as yet another example, it was ‘moved’ from Central to Stanley, and was completely rebuilt as a mall as a way to cash in on its iconic building style, which may resemble the original at first glance but have very little similarities when examined closely.
What interests me is the idea of para-sites where the style of such buildings did not originate from Hong Kong and are what architects may call a lack of site-specificity. Authentic buildings such as the colonial buildings and the fishing villages are slowly displaced by skyscrapers, monuments of the modern era. Owing to phenomena such as hyperdensity living, globalisation, gentrification and commercialisation, these modern buildings without any specific root are now what shapes Hong Kong’s cityscape, while older buildings styles are displaced.
However, colonial buildings are what displaced the native Chinese villages in the first place, and are now simply facing the same fate as what it once replaced. So where do we draw the line between heritage and modern, local and parasitic, authentic and disingenuous? Buildings, history comes and goes all the time, like so many architectures that came way before our time, so why should we care so much about preservation? Looking at upcoming projects such as Queen’s Pier and the General Post Office gave me an incomplete answer, but an answer nonetheless – Nostalgia and identity. People care because those older buildings are what they grew up under, and Hong Kong’s mix of East and West, admittedly simply used as a brand for tourism in Hong Kong, are still what people identify with. People want preservation because they don’t want them to lose their identity, to become placeless, and to have aesthetically pleasing monuments that they can be proud to be a part of.
Perhaps the takeaway from the writing is that Hong Kong needs not only to emphasis on preservation but also how to preserve buildings, if we don’t want our architecture to be rendered to nothing but an icon or an empty shell.
— Sherman Lo Shui Fung, U3035582966
Your response is very articulate and has demonstrated a good understanding of the text with emphasis in his arguments on preservation.
You may like to look at Abbas’ ideas of Merely Local and Placeless to reflect further upon your question of preservation. “The Merely Local have a close link with Hong Kong’s history and topography”, they “may have been structures rooted in a time and place, but it is a time and place that is no longer there” (1997, 82). Your point on the lack of site-specificity in colonial buildings is debatable. If you look at early colonial building like the Murray House as you have cited – although it was not in site anymore, the verandah was designed to adapt to the subtropical climate of Hong Kong which is a very common feature in buildings of the same period. To delve deeper through your examples of the Queen’s Pier and General Post Office, the first layer of their disappeared significance is their relationship to Hong Kong’s topography – the Pier being at the end of the city’s (former) main axis alongside Charter Gardens and the City Hall; the General Post Office located at the former coastline which guaranteed the quickest overseas / international dispatch of letters and parcels in the city. The second layer is their (disappeared) cultural and historical significance from the colonial days – the Pier as the exclusive porte for royal arrivals; the modernist GPO building designed to be an assembly line to ensure efficiency which was a forward idea. The question would be – are they worth being preserved, and how it should be preserved?