Hong Kong residents urged to provide opinions on built environment

In January 2015, almost 15 000 Hong Kong residents voted for their ten favorite pieces of architecture in the last 100 years in Hong Kong. The initiative was launched by the Hong Kong Architecture Centre (HKAC) for the program “My 10 most liked Hong Kong architecture of the century” in order to encourage Hong Kong residents to better appreciate their urban heritage and the evolution of their built environment.

Votes were cast across 100 sites built between the end of the 19th century to today. The sites were pre-selected by an expert panel and included commercial buildings, religious sites, historic areas, cultural spaces, and urban infrastructure. Among the sites and buildings ultimately chosen by the public, many of them appealed to memories of the city’s past structures or nostalgic sentiments, such as the famous Kowloon Walled City, destroyed in 1993, or the Hong Kong International Airport (designed by Norman Foster in 1998). According to Corrin Chan Chui-yi, architect and chairwoman of the campaign, “this showed that architecture is more than just a construction and a creation where people interact”.