The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

For over a century, the headquarters buildings of the Hongkong and
Shanghai Bank served as prominent symbols of the central business district
of Hong Kong. There were three purpose-designed buildings built
at fifty-year intervals—in 1886, 1935, 1986—each on the same site
fronting the harbor.
As headquarters of the most important financial institution in
Hong Kong, these buildings embedded in their built forms social relations
and meanings unique to the colonial setting of Hong Kong at particular
moments in time. To understand what was expressed architecturally, we
must consider what contributed to these forms in the first place; and the
power structure of colonialism provides one means of entry into such an investigation.
Although “power” by itself did not contribute directly to built
form, it was the underlying force that acted on physical manifestations as its
impact was channeled through various participants in the building process.
To analyze the power structure of colonialism involves the unfolding of relations
that operated in a hierarchical spatial order: the power structure
within the colony, the power structure between the core and the periphery,
and the power structure between the empire and the world at large. These
relations did not operate independently but reinforced each other. Together
they mapped out the overall mechanism through which colonialism was instituted
and sustained.
This chapter looks at the earliest headquarters building of 1886
and unravels how class and race relations were expressed architecturally, focusing
in particular on the “power structure” within the colony: that is, the
dominance-dependence relationship between the Europeans and the Chinese.
It examines first the characteristics of one of the main elements of
the dominant group—the merchant community, whose members were the
clients of the headquarters project and the main users of the building—and
second the relationship between the two cultural groups in terms of the
means of control, both within the Bank and in the society as a whole. Finally,
it highlights the context in which this dominance-dependence relationship
was grounded and which determined how it was expressed in the
headquarters building.
The 1886 headquarters building was commissioned in 1882
when the scheme prepared by Clement Palmer of the architectural firm
Wilson and Bird won the public competition launched by the Bank. 1 A
local contractor called “Tai Yick” was used, and the building took four
years to complete at a cost of HK$300,000. 2 The site was rectangular in
shape, with a frontage of 125 feet and a depth of 225 feet, and stood on reclaimed
land along the praya (embankment). 3 The building consisted of
two separate volumes linked together: that facing the harbor with arched