Hong Kong Heritage Podcast (RTHK3) – Hong Kong’s Architectural Legacy of ‘Delayed Modernism’ #3 – RIP North Point Methodist Church

Posted: April 12th, 2022 | No Comments »

Tragically after we had discussed and recorded the podcast on Hong Kong modernist architecture the North Point Methodist Church (1961) was bulldozed! An act of vandalismthat has slipped through in a time of covid and authoritarianism in Hong Kong. See my brief notes on the structure and its very important architect and influence from Le Corbusier. The demolition of the church was an act of architectural and aesthetic philistinism that is quite horrific…

A great example of ‘delayed modernism’. Designed in 1961 by the architect Robert Fan Wenzhao. Great modernist influences – primarily Corbusier’s 1954 chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, France. But what’s really interesting is that this is a Robert Fan building, a Shanghai born/trained and working architect who embraced all aspects of modernism moving over the late 1920s and 1930s through art deco to a localised form of Chinese deco (in tandem with his sometime colleague the Chinese-American architect Poy Gum Lee) to, later, embrace the influences of the Bauhaus, Brutalism and Corbusier. He moved to HK in 1949 and this was his most overtly modernist commission in the colony.

---