VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages

Abstract

Over the past two decades, architectural protection and conservation have come to practice in modernist buildings in Hong Kong. Public buildings designed and constructed around the 1930s to 1950s with significant design merits were renovated or extended for adaptive reuse, while others were eventually demolished. The Star Ferry Piers in Central had been torn down, leaving only its Clock Tower to be reconstructed. The Wan Chai Market site has been redeveloped, sustaining the façade and the front part. The former Hollywood Road Police Married Quarters has been renovated into a hub for the local creative industry while the Central Market has been revitalised as a mix-use space, both of which, however, lost their spatial merits of the original design. By scrutinizing the conservation and revitalisation process and the outcomes of the projects, this paper argues that, despite increasing awareness of the value of built heritages, the lack of understanding of the design qualities specific to modernist buildings, among other challenges, has significantly led to the unsatisfactory results. It further reveals that the general criteria adopted by the grading system for historic buildings are deficient in providing guidelines to recognise design characteristics of modernist buildings and calls for scholarship on modern architectural heritages to improve the understanding of the general public.