Articles by Jonathan Yeung

In Hong Kong, where interiors and small buildings are routinely caught between two extremes—high-gloss “luxury” finishes on one end, and budget-cautious industrial roughness on the other—a third attitude has emerged through the calibration of both: a uniquely precise, relevant, and materially honest execution that is not dependent on price point. This is calibrated rawness. Calibrated rawness describes an architecture that retains the directness of matter and materiality—concrete, metal, blockwork, exposed structure, visible services—while subjecting it to rigorous control.

When Hong Kong’s architectural story is told, it is often reduced to a handful of icons. Many people most readily name I.M. Pei—Pritzker Prize laureate and architect of the Bank of China Tower in Central (1990), as well as global works such as the Le Grand Louvre in Paris and the Miho Museum in Shiga. Looking elsewhere, one also encounters a long lineage of British and international architects whose imprints have shaped the city’s institutional skyline: from Ron Phillips’ civic works—most notably the former Murray Building (1969), now The Murray Hotel, and Hong Kong City Hall (1962)—to Norman Foster’s infrastructural and corporate monuments, including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Tower (1986) and Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and, more recently, Zaha Hadid Architects’ The Henderson (2024).

Architectural heritage is not only what a building was, but what it continues to become: a long process of building, rebuilding, and re-occupying over time. Where opportunities allow, this continuity produces a layered condition—one in which visitors can witness, experience, and feel the gradual shifting of a building’s fabric, materiality, spatial order, and patterns of use, and occasionally even participate in that transformation.

Coastal development in major cities has long been a terrain of opportunity and contention—shaped at once by the pursuit of capital (premium views, scarce land, and the promise of reclamation), by civic demands for public access and collective waterfront life, and by contemporary aspirations for sustainability and place-defining urban identity. Precisely because these agendas rarely align, extracting the full potential of waterfront sites is never straightforward.

This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.

Lu Wenyu—co-founder of Amateur Architecture Studio with Pritzker laureate Wang Shu—has shaped many of the practice’s most emblematic works across China, including the Ningbo History Museum and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Often working outside the spotlight, her leadership is unmistakable in the discipline of execution and the roles she has assumed: in 2003, together with Wang Shu, she established the Architecture Department at the China Academy of Art, where she also serves as Director of the Sustainable Construction Center. Her practice and teaching form a reciprocal loop: research conducted in studios at the China Academy of Art continually folds back into construction strategies on site, while lessons learned in the field return to the classroom as material intelligence rather than abstract theory.

Across cities worldwide, architecture unfolds continuously at the scale of people and community—not only through new buildings, renovations, or monumental works. “Third spaces” are especially revealing. Consider the street-side culinary realm: how seating, serving, and lingering occupy the edge of the street often discloses a city’s cultural codes and spatial habits. What forms of dining and inhabitation have emerged in response to local climate, regulation, and social custom—and how have they evolved over time?

Urban renewal is inherently fraught—financially complex, politically exposed, stakeholder-dense, and almost guaranteed to leave someone dissatisfied. Precisely for these reasons, many cities default to inertia rather than risk the upheaval that comes with reworking entrenched urban fabrics, their residences, and their dynamics; once the “sleeping bear” is prodded, unexpected complications tend to multiply.

Urban renewal is inherently fraught—financially complex, politically exposed, stakeholder-dense, and almost guaranteed to leave someone dissatisfied. Precisely for these reasons, many cities default to inertia rather than risk the upheaval that comes with reworking entrenched urban fabrics, their residences, and their dynamics; once the “sleeping bear” is prodded, unexpected complications tend to multiply.

Living by the beach has long been a defining aspiration—drawn by the promise of tempered nature, privacy, and immediate access to the water. Historically, beach houses tended to be rustic and pared back: partly because servicing remote sites and delivering materials was difficult, and partly because their charm lay in being closer to the elements—simpler, rougher, more direct.