Modernist architectural masterpieces of Hong Kong celebrated – from ‘dull’ mixed-use buildings to The Murray hotel and General Post Office
- A generation of Chinese architects descended on Hong Kong in the 1950s and designed its post-war cityscape to accommodate a fast-growing population
- Their Modernist style, descended from the Bauhaus movement, is celebrated in a book and exhibition, with some buildings already gone and others soon to be lost
Now you see it, now you don’t: a mantra for the continuous redevelopment of Hong Kong. Either that, or build it and they will come (if the rents aren’t too high).
The rapid urban development of the post-second world war economic boom years gave Hong Kong its characteristic vertical, hyper-dense, interconnected cityscape, says German urban planner Walter Koditek. A historically significant element of this cityscape is now threatened, or already succumbing to the wrecking ball.
In his book Hong Kong Modern: Architecture of the 1950s-1970s and exhibition of the same name, amateur photographer Koditek, who also describes himself as an “urban wanderer”, documents not just the superstar structures of the Modernist Movement but also what he calls the “omnipresent and somewhat ordinary” buildings of a particular period that are now earning belated recognition.
The project began haphazardly, in 2015, with Koditek walking the city with his camera and simply “collecting” buildings that caught his eye. In the time it has taken to morph into a comprehensive visual record of what he labels an architectural “moment in time”, some of Hong Kong’s Modernist masterworks have become rubble.
