Hong Kong’s Early Composite Building: Appraising the Social Value and Place Meaning of a Distinctive Living Urban Heritage

Abstract

Hong Kong ceased to be a British colony in 1997, an event referred to as the “Handover,” and entered into a peculiar state of “One Country, Two Systems.” This political arrangement allows Hong Kong to be under Chinese sovereignty while maintaining the administrative, educational, financial, and legal systems established by the British, but for a limited period of 50 years before full integration with China. At this time (2019), the city has acquired the quaint quality of being culturally Chinese, economically capitalist, and physically impressive. Ever appealing to filmmakers, the skyscraper festooned cityscape of post-colonial Hong Kong has been captured by a series of Hollywood blockbusters, including two movies that have brought global fame to a massive building with a surreal dystopian quality. Since then, Internet bloggers and Instagrammers from near and far have swarmed into the premises to take photos and videos by day and night, immortalizing the building in thousands of still and motion pictures on social media platforms. Because of its massiveness when seen from King’s Road, people started to call it the “Monster Building,” a name that has caught on and been propagated through the internet. The building is perhaps the most well-known example of Hong Kong’s 1960s Composite Building typology, and it serves as the home of hundreds of people. This chapter examine this extraordinary case study to look more broadly at the typology as a living urban heritage from which place attachment has been formed by a collective society, and individual habitants that occupy the building.