A tourist arrives at the Chek Lap Kok airport after a tiring long-haul flight. He boards the Airport Express and gets off at Central. He gets in a taxi at the underground station, and as it turns up the narrow tunnel that leads to the very heart of the city, the tourist gets his first glimpse at a Hong Kong building: a classical structure that evokes a different time and era, one both in tune and at odds with the city's aesthetic.
This is 50 Connaught Road Central, a building that seemingly popped-up overnight last June. It's a fascinating piece of architecture, alluding to numerous things at once: some see it as a throwback to our colonial days, when low-rise, stone-based structures lined the now-shrinking Victoria Harbour. Others have called it the city's first truly New York building, a beautiful, art-deco inspired piece of architecture.
But to its creator, the architect Robert A.M. Stern, it will always be a Hong Kong building. '50 Connaught Road Central is very rooted in the tradition of western architecture as it has evolved in Asia, and more specifically Hong Kong,' says Stern. 'It's rooted in buildings like the old Bank of China, before the invasion of the super-scale, glass-clad buildings that now dominate the city's skyline.'
Stern's name might not be familiar to the masses; it might not roll off a hipster's tongue as easily as Zaha Hadid or Thomas Heatherwick. But for true disciples of architecture, Stern is a master.
His students at the many universities he has taught at - Columbia, Yale - have gone on to create some of the world's most defining structures. The books he has penned (there are almost 20 on his website) are considered bibles in the architectural community. And most importantly, his work, which ranges from dozens of classically inspired buildings all over New York to a two-million square-foot development in Xiamen, China, has been revered for decades.
50 Connaught Road Central is his first completed project in Hong Kong. On paper, a 28-storey structure paper might not seem impressive when compared to the city's record 108 floors, but two things make the building stand out, the first being its use of location.
