I quite enjoy visiting the Asia Society building here in Hong Kong. I like to get a coffee and hang about it if I have time to kill and a hand bag full of bug spray. I've also been to a few events in the new building and a few exhibitions in the re-furbished buildings, all of which have been lovely.
It's a haven in an area of town called Admiralty. A yawn-o-rama part of the city full of swish hotels, vacuous endless shopping, traffic jams and millions of people sprawling all over each other. You'd be forgiven to think that all of Hong Kong is like the above described, but there are escapes and this wee garden is a tiny one in the center of a hellish bit of town.
In this article Suzanne Stephens puts forward a nice description of the building, it's conception and construction. It is a description that fits the building and this city hands down, very nice conservative and definitely not thrilling.
The setting in the hill is priceless and the history of the magazine factory is delightfully apparent, which is good because unfortunately there is no information to look at. I agree that the merging of the natural and man made in this horizontal building is a joy and quite well considered, but the most entertaining part of this post is the comments.
The readers RAGE about a key missing point in the article, that the work has been executed terribly. The historic buildings - fab. The walkways - lovely (if a bit of an afterthought). The location - breathtaking. The preservation and restoration work - second to none. The shitty paint work on the new building peeling only months after construction - not so good.
It feels like it has been fumbled at the end. Like everyone just said 'fuck it, just get the workies to paint it in whatever they want and we'll get outa here.' It makes me so terribly sad that this building has such great potential and has been arsed up by cutting corners and a loss of interest before the end. I suppose that's Asia for you...
It's a haven in an area of town called Admiralty. A yawn-o-rama part of the city full of swish hotels, vacuous endless shopping, traffic jams and millions of people sprawling all over each other. You'd be forgiven to think that all of Hong Kong is like the above described, but there are escapes and this wee garden is a tiny one in the center of a hellish bit of town.
In this article Suzanne Stephens puts forward a nice description of the building, it's conception and construction. It is a description that fits the building and this city hands down, very nice conservative and definitely not thrilling.
The setting in the hill is priceless and the history of the magazine factory is delightfully apparent, which is good because unfortunately there is no information to look at. I agree that the merging of the natural and man made in this horizontal building is a joy and quite well considered, but the most entertaining part of this post is the comments.
The readers RAGE about a key missing point in the article, that the work has been executed terribly. The historic buildings - fab. The walkways - lovely (if a bit of an afterthought). The location - breathtaking. The preservation and restoration work - second to none. The shitty paint work on the new building peeling only months after construction - not so good.
It feels like it has been fumbled at the end. Like everyone just said 'fuck it, just get the workies to paint it in whatever they want and we'll get outa here.' It makes me so terribly sad that this building has such great potential and has been arsed up by cutting corners and a loss of interest before the end. I suppose that's Asia for you...
No comments:
Post a Comment