The man considered Hong Kong’s emperor of architecture – the city’s own master builder, its home-sprung fountainhead – is talking about his new book. The original title he’d chosen was Learning from Hong Kong? “The question mark is important because that means I’m not being too conceited or self-centred,” says Rocco Yim Sen-kee. Framed within the screen of a video call from his office, he has the look of an earnest monk. “The idea that people could learn from Hong Kong in the art of architecture and urban design seemed to me preposterous.”
Still, the first sentence of his introductory essay, which is called “Looking to Hong Kong?” – querying punctuation included – revisits his initial hesitation that Hong Kong might have architectural lessons to offer. It retains that word “preposterous”. The second sentence reads: “After all, this is a city that has a tradition of standing aloof from any form of academic discourse on the subject.”
He’s on record as saying that when he was an architecture student at the University of Hong Kong in the 1970s, it was the easiest faculty to get into, no high marks were required and 80 per cent of his classmates had no idea what architecture really meant. Really, he’d wanted to be an artist.
Even his English name, with its faint echo of rococo, turns out to have been accidental rather than predestined. “Rocco was the nickname my parents chose for me when I was still a baby,” he says, grinning. “I was told it resembles the mumbling noises I made before I could actually speak.” Upon such an unpromising foundation, he has built his practice.
I’m more curious about places, objects, things of beauty, than people
