Nowadays, when one visits the big coastal cities in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Tianjin, one cannot help but marvel at the new skylines adorned with numerous skyscrapers of distinctive avant-garde design. These buildings are architectural statements that bespeak a city's vision of the future.

However, great architectural statements are seen as that much greater if they serve as fitting extensions to the environments in which they are placed.

Architects do not work in a vacuum, divorced from the other sciences. They consider sociology, considering how the dimensions and availability of living space will impact upon the living culture, and on the customs and interpersonal relationships of the resident community. They must also apply psychology, taking account of how their designs will affect the character, temperament and mood of its users.

It was instinctive among traditional Chinese architects to take feng shui into account, so that their works blended harmoniously with their natural surroundings. Traditional Chinese buildings required symmetry and balance of forms and the architectural design reflected interpersonal and family relationships. Architects did not intrude into the natural environment but embraced nature as a major component of their designs and a contributor to their architectural whole.

Alas nature is in retreat from most of our cities today, so that we can no longer afford to use its natural products in our material designs. Our incorporation of wood, for example, once so prized by traditional Chinese architects for its symbolism of nature and as a building material that possessed vitality, must be extremely discreet and selective, if only because - proportionally - there is so little of it left.

Nowadays the building materials most frequently used emphasize extravagance of detail over harmonious integrity. They employ marble, sheets of glass, metal, crystal and large Roman fountains. The more ostentatious are named after palaces, manors, courts and so on. Little attention has been paid to blending in with the environment and the natural elements.

No wonder much of our modern architecture has often been criticized for having little to do with culture and the arts. Such buildings appear to serve other purposes. Among these are inorganic structures, built in the last half century, that are monuments to a movement based on erasing the past. Now they stand at the center of a preservation puzzle: what to keep and what to pull down to satisfy the whims of popular taste? Although these were buildings designed to endure, most will not outlast the tides of change.

What, then, should be our guiding principle as we explore the exciting possibilities of new trends in architecture? Modern living requires quality space. In this new age we must not lose sight of the fact that architecture is an art form that blends real space and virtual space. The job of an architect is to fill the real space with life, imagination and spiritual freshness, and extract from its virtual space a modern outlook.

For all these reasons I believe that our new trends in architecture must borrow at least one leaf from the pages of the past, in that they continue to harmonize, stimulate, enhance, interpret, and lend new meanings to what is already there.

The author is former secretary for home affairs of the Hong Kong SAR government

(HK Edition 01/06/2010 page1)