Hong Kong Island Mid Level
2023.09.05 Makalin Wongchinchai
This year, Hong Kong Lighting Detectives organized a night walk event at Hong Kong Island Mid-Level. We invited some college students and designers to join us. Let’ s explore the night walk with us and see when historic lights meet.
Detectives explored the special relationshipand imapct lighting in the architectural environment . The old central area of Hollywood Road in Hong Kong is well known for its rich architectural heritage, featuring a mix of Eastern and Western styles that reflects its colonial past. We have curated a route that allows us to discover some of the most significant historic and modern-day elements. In addition, a walk through the Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail, where we can still find traces of his revolution left on this land. This time, we invited college students and designers .
As we were exploring the historical site, we found that the route was relatively dark . Most of heritage architectures, such as medical sciences museum, Man Mo temple or the stairs during the night walk, don’t have lighting. So it makes these heritage buildings disappear at night and creates the dark area on the stairs, which makes it difficult and unsafe to walk through these stairs. The light trespass and glare are also the main issues in this area where you may know that Hong Kong is one of the cities with the most light polluted in the world.
From our survey, we found that lots of façade and interior lighting from the commercial buildings is shining over the buildings surrounding. A sample of this light ollution is the interior lighting from the commercial building that lights up the church. From the view from the outside, it looks like the lighting is up on this church.
Glare is also an issue since there are a lot of shops and restaurants where the spotlight lights up the signage, but at the
same time, it will make people glare as they walk through the street. Lighting color temperature inconsistency is the villain point that we have found. From the street light, the lighting color and temperature are different even in the same area. The thing that we can assume is for the lamp replacement, which is not well maintained to keep all the lighting color temperatures consistent. Even though there are lots of villains that need improvement, the contrast lighting between trees and the skyline lighting view is the hero of our survey. It makes people enjoy the Hong Kong lighting view at night and releases the stress of the vivid city. (Makalin Wongchinchai)
