The gentlest of fighters

From the balconies of this Sir YK Pao Studio, one side looks out to the entrance of Hong Kong Harbour; the other one looks onto the Pok Fu Lam Reservoir. Little wonder she called this project “resetting the gem of Hong Kong”.

Anna donated this studio in order to solve the requirement of refurbishing the roof with 19th century provincial tiles, which would have been impossibly expensive. Instead she proposed to build this modern glass roof so that people at a banquet can sit “under the stars.”

Photo: Béthanie chapel

Twenty years ago, Professor Sohmen was taken to see what was at the time, a series of abandoned, broken-down buildings hidden in the trees above Telegraph Bay. At the time, as chairman of the HKAPA, she was painfully aware of the Academy’s need for additional space to accommodate their growing student population. And there in front of her, the answer lay, albeit in the most distinctly impractical of forms of a chapel, a sanatorium, and some dilapidated cow sheds. Whilst the structure of the church had been injected with hope by an earlier Grade II listing, the cow sheds and the ancillary buildings were literally in the shadow of the bulldozer’s blade when she came across them. Anna’s discovery of them was fortuitous and quite by chance, her route being determined by the narrow carriage driveway and the bulky presence of a century old Banyan tree. The tenacious Anna was not ready to put a full stop to this project, but carried on until she found another access. It took a couple of years to negotiate building a new road, retaining the Banyan tree and changing the fate of the two cow sheds.