PRESENCE — THE ARCHITECTURE OF ROCCO DESIGN 當下—嚴迅奇的建築

edited by James Saywell

with foreword by Michele Calzavara, Peter Cook & Marco Imperadori

No one has built more city buildings in Hong Kong than the architect Rocco Yim. A sequel to Being Chinese in Architecture published in 2004, Presence highlights a collection of Rocco Yim’s 14 architecture projects, spanning the museum, educational institutions, the public library, government house, district redevelopment, and the residential complex, across Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Boan, Yunnan, Shanghai in Mainland China and Hong Kong. Through these projects, the book also reveals the proposition of ‘architecture shaping the city’ and ‘the city shaping architecture’. Architecture evolves from the roots of tradition and ingrained qualities of 'place', thus inducing the development of the immediate urban form; contemporary urban forces such as infrastructural configurations, behavioral patterns, the spatial and structural systems exert tensions and contribute to the evolution of the architecture.