How architect made a remote Hong Kong hillside location the perfect site for college for troubled teens
- For 10 years architect Anderson Lee has battled government red tape, and lately coronavirus restrictions, to build Christian Zheng Sheng College’s new campus
- The school, for youngsters with drug problems, is built on stilts because of the steep terrain, and has an open-plan, eco-friendly interior
For more than 20 years, Christian Zheng Sheng College has helped teenagers in Hong Kong struggling with drug addiction, but it has always endured a struggle of its own: finding a permanent home.
Housed in a makeshift campus on the remote, roadless Chi Ma Wan peninsula on Lantau Island, in 2007 it was given the opportunity to take over an abandoned secondary school in Mui Wo, a town on the island.
But that ignited a firestorm of controversy: residents objected to the prospect of being in the midst of children with a history of crime, some of them recovering from substance abuse. Things became even worse when Next Magazine accused the school of fraud, which sparked an investigation by the Independent Commission Against Corruption that eventually cleared the institution of all wrongdoing.
And so it was back to square one, its vulnerable students stuck in tin-roofed shacks on an isolated part of Lantau accessible only by sea. But the college had a plan: raise funds to build a new campus right next to its old one. When architect Anderson Lee, of Index Architecture, heard about the goal, he volunteered to design the new school.
Ten years later, construction is wrapped up and the project is finally nearing completion – although interiors have yet to be fitted out and a teaching kitchen is still to be equipped. It wasn’t an easy process, especially considering the last stretch of construction came just as Hong Kong was battered by the coronavirus, which caused a final nine-month delay owing to pandemic restrictions.
