Architectural Preservation Studio, DPC

Honk Kong

Architectural Preservation Studio is working with AGC Design Ltd. to rehabilitate and adaptively reuse the Central Market of Hong Kong the Urban Renewal Authority (URA). The 1938 Bauhaus-style four-story concrete structure covers a full block in the central business district of Hong Kong and is currently listed by the Antiquities Monuments Office (AMO) as a Grade IIl building. Central Market’s design emphasizes its horizontality with projecting brise soleils, visors and canopies, and concrete surfaces interrupted by steel hopper strip windows. The Central Market opened in a purposefully built Neoclassical structure in the area of the Canton Bazaar in 1850, which was later replaced with the current building.

The interior circulation is built around a central courtyard. Two main staircases exist at either end of the long north-south axis; these gain light from a courtyard. There is a one-bay wide two-story bridge at the center of the courtyard that links the west and east wings of the building at the 2nd and 3rd floors. The stalls on each floor are laid out on both sides of central aisles parallel to the long direction of the building. At its completion, the ground floor could accommodate 57 fish and 46 poultry stalls, the 2nd floor vegetable and fruit vendors, and 62 pork and 42 beef stalls were on the 3rd floor. The top floor includes roof terraces both towards the courtyard and street sides, along with rooms designed as offices for the Sanitary Departments. The building was closed to the public in 2003.

APS is working as the concrete conservators for the project for the exterior façade elements, as well as the preservation, display and interpretation of six original market-stall types, two of which have to be reconstructed. One portion of the building already functions as a walkthrough connecting the Central District’s skywalk system. The remainder of the building will be reused as an urban “oasis”, with prepared-food stalls and shops on three of the four floors and a garden in the central courtyard. The top floor will be used for utilities.

Makkah Al-Mukarramah, Saudi Arabia

Historic Jeddah, the Gate to Makkah is an urban property extending over a surface of 17 hectares in the heart of the old city of Jeddah. It is directly associated, both at the symbolic intangible level and at the architectural and urban level with hajj, the yearly Muslim pilgrimage to the Holy City of Makkah.

For the Jeddah Municipality, advice was needed on design guidelines in compliance with UNESCO’s Operational Guidelines. In addition, during the process of preparing the nomination for inscription as a World Heritage site, evaluation of integrity and authenticity and criteria for inscription were evaluated.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Mud-brick ruins form an urban site located on the outskirts of Riyadh on the banks of Wadi Hanifah. Dating to the 15th century, the site was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2010, its Outstanding Universal Value relating to its exemplification of Najdi architecture, its relationship to the surrounding environments, as well as its significance due to its association as the birthplace of the Wahabi sect of Islam. At the invitation of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities (SCTA), Pamela Jerome participated as one of five invited international experts in a two-day workshop to provide recommendations to SCTA on their implementation of a master plan to conserve and display the site to the public in the context of compliance with the UNESCO Operational Guidelines. The range of activities include the introduction of infrastructure, raised walkways, glazed cubicles inserted into the interiors of ruined buildings for museum displays, stabilization of the ruins, and planning and zoning regulations for the buffer zone.

Tarim, Yemen

Tarim is a mud-brick city of 100,000 located at the eastern end Wadi Hadhramaut in Yemen. Recognized as the spiritual center of the valley, the city is famous for its 42-meter tall mud-brick minaret al-Muhdhar, manuscript library, three historic graveyards, Shafai’i schools of jurisprudence, and its collection of eclectic mansions. The latter, a product of the aspirations of a merchant class that made their fortune in Southeast Asia, are executed in the local construction technology of load-bearing mud brick and decorative lime plaster.

Approximately 15 of the mansions were expropriated in the early 1970s under the former Marxist regime and mostly reused as housing for the poor. As a result, 20 years later when the buildings were returned to their rightful owners, the structures had suffered significantly from lack of maintenance. Essentially abandoned by their former owners who perceived the mansions as more valuable as plots of land, the buildings were undergoing demolition by neglect. After initial research in 1997 and 1999, which resulted in an award-winning documentary, “The Architecture of Mud,” and an award-winning technical paper by the same name, Prof. Pamela Jerome with the Yemeni authorities proposed and successfully listed the abandoned mansions on the World Monuments Fund Watch List from 2000-2004. Funding was provided by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for the initial feasibility study, accomplished in 2000, and later by UNESCO for an updated feasibility study, submitted in 2004. Prof. Jerome implemented a documentation-training program that paired Columbia University historic-preservation graduate students with employees of Yemen’s General Organization of Antiquities and Museums (GOAM) and undergraduate architecture students from the University of the Hadhramaut, which from 2002 through 2008 documented seven of the significant abandoned mansions in AutoCAD and digital photography, including Quick Time Virtual Reality (QTVR).

In addition to the training program, funding was procured to restore the exteriors of several of the buildings from a variety sources, including Yemen’s Social Fund for Development, US State Department’s Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation, and the Prince Claus Fund of the Netherlands. Twenty of the mansions are now restored. Prof. Jerome also provided capacity building for local officials and NGOs, organized the masons into a guild, presented the project at numerous international symposia and museums, and collaborated with an international consultant to prepare the Tentative List nomination for Tarim based on its Outstanding Universal Value of exporting Islam to the Indian Ocean region.

Luxor, Egypt

The village of New Gourna was designed by the well-known 20th-century Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy, for the Supreme Council of Antiquities to house the occupants of Gourna, a village dating to the turn of the 19th century that was constructed on top of the Tombs of the Nobles in Luxor. Designed and implemented in the 1940s, Fathy used local construction technology to create one- to two-story mud-brick buildings with local vernacular references to express his vision of low impact, sustainable design appropriate to the climatic conditions of the region. However, the majority of Gourna villagers refused to move to New Gourna, and continued to occupy their homes over the archaeological site of the Tombs of the Nobles.

Over 60 years later, New Gourna has suffered from lack of maintenance and appropriation of majority of the buildings by squatters. The current occupants have piecemeal demolished Fathy’s buildings and replaced them with poorly engineered and inappropriate four-story concrete-frame structures that do not respect the scale or design intent of Fathy’s vision. Since the site is part of the larger World Heritage site of Luxor, UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre, in collaboration with the Egyptian authorities and World Monuments Fund, chose to implement a study and management plan for its restoration and re-envisioning as a center for sustainable architecture. APS professional staff, Pamela Jerome, was one of three invited international experts that performed the initial site evaluation.

Tripoli, Lebanon

In collaboration with the UNESCO regional office in Beirut, development of a Conservation Management Plan for a 1962 international fairground in Tripoli, Lebanon consisting of 15 structures designed by Brazilian architect, Oscar Neimeyer, and on Lebanon's Tentative List.