Hong Kong is a concentration – of place, people, energy and intellect.

The constraints defining how this city would grow were compounded of history and circumstance, scarcity of land and declivity of terrain. Between them they shaped what is arguably the world’s most outstanding example of an architectural matrix evolving from the special needs of its inhabitants.

But those same constraints also fashioned a metropolis that betrays little of its origins, for in its restless desire to extract the utmost from available resources. Hong Kong has obliterated virtually all trace of where it began less than two centuries ago.

Distinctive of its approach to accommodating some of the planet’s highest population densities is the layered profile of Hong Kong’s urban development. Overlaying strata of transportation routes, pedestrian walkways, shopping arcades and public gardens are stacked one above the other to provide vertical rather than horizontal access.

Location – that keyword beloved of all realtors – was, from the outset, the prime consideration. Everything had to be shoehorned into one small island on the South China coast, its topography so vertiginous that when it embarked on its astonishing career in 1842. the embryonic trading settlement was compelled to align itself along a narrow strip of foreshore fronting the harbour that had summoned it into existence. It became a city that lived by, for and because of the sea.

The first of many reclamations from that sea was undertaken within nine years of the city’s foundation, setting the pattern for subsequent extensions of the shoreline out into the harbour which, by the time of the Japanese invasion in 1941 – a hundred years after Hong Kong’s inception – had added 1.425 acres, or more than two square miles, to the total land mass. Even by conservative calculations, such accretions to both the original island, its adjoining land mass and the even larger neighbouring island of Lantau. have since multiplied that figure tenfold.

But insufficiency of usable building land was not the only factor predicating either this recourse to artificial supplement or the perpendicular thrust of the structural forms that absorbed its availability as soon as it was created. Still more compelling was the urgent dictate of public demand.

The first prerequisite, of even the earliest of the many waves of immigrants who began flooding into Hong Kong from the Chinese mainland, was proximity of home to place of employment. Because an unhindered capacity to work presented the fastest and surest route to economic salvation, the new arrivals would prefer to waste as little time as possible in transit between the two.

If they could not actually reside at the workplace itself they would choose to live directly above, as was the case with the pioneer shophouses crowding the heights above Western District and Kennedy Town.

This willing sacrifice of comfort and seclusion, to the demands of convenience and accessibility, suggested a solution first posed within the government’s public works department, who were charged with the mammoth task of creating vast rehousing schemes, and eventually whole new townships, into which could be decanted the tremendous influx of new arrivals in the post-war years.

Resettlement became the rallying cry of an administration driven to the wall by the problems of coping with thousands upon thousands of refugees, who crowded into perilous and vulnerable squatter areas ascending the hillsides, where they were prone to flood and fire, rainstorm and landslide.

Private developers took their cue from the multi-dimensional array initially devised as an expedient to meet pressures of circumstance. If it served to make life more convenient in low-cost public housing estates, there was no reason why it should not prove equally applicable to more sophisticated residential and commercial environments.

They set out to improve upon the all-in-one formula that packaged homes, offices, commercial precincts, service utilities and transportation nodes into one irresistibly convenient parcel. Integrated estates, equivalent to fair-sized townships elsewhere in the world, became the building blocks of new satellite cities spreading out into the rural hinterlands beyond the Kowloon foothills.

The rapid growth of the Mass Transit Railway in the eighties, with accompanying development rights over station complexes, spread its own nexus of expansion, planting tendrils like some rampantly territorial efflorescence through established urban areas and beyond.

The rest of the world, confounded by the evidence that it was possible to compact human populations within hitherto inconceivable spatial limitations, came to observe, admire and, where feasible, imitate. Hong Kong palpably dispelled nightmarish visions of urban proliferation portrayed in Fritz Lang’s 1926 cinematic masterpiece ‘Metropolis.’ prompting the Deutsches Architektur-Museum in Frankfurt to mount a special exhibition in 1993/94. entitled ‘Hong Kong Architecture – the Aesthetics of Density.”

Chroniclers of the Hong Kong skyline date back to the late nineteenth century. In each account one detects an eye for the natural amphitheatre which set the stage for a striking synthesis between architecture and environment; that dramatic combination of harbour and encircling mountains that created one of the world’s most instantly recognizable panoramas.

Some visitors, lost for parallels, fell back on those that could be called to mind, however inappropriate. Not a few likened Hong Kong to Gibraltar, if for no other reason than the fact that the two shared the same distinctive bulwark of mountain overshadowing man’s efforts to subdue it into some form of harmonious coexistence. In Hong Kong’s case, as time has shown, that subjugation was to prove infinitely more successful.

Its mountainous backdrop delineates both Hong Kong’s character and its frame of reference. The steady ascent of its lower slopes, in serried ranks of building upon building, each successively replaced many times throughout Hong Kong’s relatively brief history, constitutes the symmetry for which this city is best remembered.

There is, however, an obverse side to the coin. By using its mountains as yardsticks on which to peg its ambitions. Hong Kong has risked forfeiting the principal component of its inimitable appearance.

Viewed now from the sea, or from the opposite shores of Kowloon. it seems so intent on storming the heights that the sheer scale and mass of its endeavours all but obscures the view. The result is a triumph of architecture over environment perhaps, but a loss of the felicitous balance that once brought out the best of both.

Those in love with the past, or seeking a continuity of architectural expression whose roots can be logically traced back through time, will be largely disappointed in Hong Kong, where buildings of any antiquity are sometimes more valued for their scarcity than for any intrinsic architectural merit.

Those beguiled by the future, and in particular by the advent of the third millennium, will be fascinated to discover a city in ferment, endlessly reworking and reshaping itself, going back over the same ground again and again to maximize its potential.

Cramming more floor space within a given plot ratio, to obtain the best returns and achieve the most striking visual effect the site will allow, is an objective too often assayed simply by striving to be bigger, better and more imposing than the competition.

The cumulative effect is of a city obsessed with sheer scale; caught up in a race the west has long abandoned, but with which the east still seems excessively preoccupied. Quiet respectability becomes less important than ostentatious braggadocio and sheer verve, producing results which – whether triumphant success or spectacular failure – will not escape attention.

The challenge afforded by each new commission has been a boon to the development of Hong Kong’s resident architectural expertise. Trained overseas, most young architects have returned steeped in western traditions, setting out to demonstrate they are capable of matching the best that can be produced by leading practitioners from abroad. What they have so far failed to achieve is an evolution of indigenous forms that would offer the first glimmerings of an authentically ‘Hong Kong’ style.

With too few exceptions, they submit to preconceived notions of clients content to compete with, rather than depart from, the edifices erected by their rivals. While architects look for opportunities to boldly go where none have gone before, big business prefers to stick with the proven and reliable. The spirit of adventure is less entrenched in Hong Kong’s commercial bastions than is a belief in established formulae and popular taste.

Whatever may account for this neglect. Hong Kong appears to have turned its back on the last concrete evidence of its history, as expressed through the fabric with which that history was associated. Its traces have largely disappeared, and with them have gone all strands of a definable evolutionary trend that might have bridged past and present as a platform on which to found the future.

Few vestiges remain of the colonial heritage which, for more than a century and a half, until Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. channeled and energized its volatile progress. Were it not for the former Supreme Court building that now houses the seat of its legislature, and an abandoned Government House reduced to the status more of a mausoleum than museum. Hong Kong would already be bereft of intelligible clues to account for its apparent eruption into the twenty-first century, as though it were born but yesterday.

The Antiquities and Monuments Board has dedicated itself to the salvation of whatever historical buildings it can snatch from the jaws of excavators and the hammers of demolition crews. But much has so far escaped its ambit. Unless these limited achievements are reinforced. Hong Kong stands in danger of appearing a society so zealously absorbed in the future that it has consciously expunged its memories, seemingly content to inhabit a city without a past.