"It's about the search for the promised land, really," Henry told me, which made me think that perhaps some promised lands are best not found.

At the time we were sitting next to a version of one in the Hong Kong Club, a Graeco/Roman/Hollywood fantasy of arched pillars, which Henry has dubbed "The Wailing Wall".  I would wail too if anything so beeyoodeeful, ho leng, as the teenage shoppers might say, were meant to represent me in any way. It just goes to show how many architects and designers we have whose cultural roots have been pulled up and replanted on barren rock or never replanted at all.  You do not find their offerings only on the tops of Sai Ying Pun buildings.  And it is not architects and designers alone who are so inspired when every housing estate has its Hello Kitty outlets  - "waaahh, ho leng". We are out on the search for beauty and truth again.  Someone has crafted yet another dream of the promised land.

It is a search to which this town has uniquely evolved.  Leave alone that the umbilical cord to the motherland has been a little pinched ever since 1841 and was squeezed tight in 1949, 'colonial' is a word that implies borrowed culture as well as borrowed sovereignty.  A contributing influence is that Hong Kong has always sustained itself by doing what China might better be suited to doing but cannot or will not do at the time. Cultural life has followed this lead.  Let's be a little different.  We shall have our theme and a China theme it shall be, but it is the variation we shall play.

The trouble is that modern engineering technology has intruded and the variations have so multiplied that no-one is sure where the theme lies any longer.  This is a town in search of a promised land because the one it had somehow slipped away and was lost while everyone was hard at work.  Now no-one knows quite where to find it or even quite sure what it looks like any longer.  But everyone wants to look for it.

Yet the search is one of things that makes this such an enchanting place to live.  Yes, it is eye wrenching in its ultimate expressions of noveau riche excess (and ear-wrenching when accompanied by sound track).  But when it goes to excess it can also be hilarious.  Most of all it brings exuberance to communal life, a zest for playing with new ideas, a willingness to try anything and knock it away again tomorrow if it doesn't work.  We might think of America like that a hundred years ago - boisterous and not giving a damn for overly-cultured visitors who held up their noses and called it vulgar and rootless.  America was the promised land to streams of immigrants who came to collect on that promise.  Hong Kong is still much like that now, only a generation or two away from the big immigrant rush, lost to its past, uncertain of its present and dreaming wild dreams of its future, not all of them good dreams but exuberant ones and little restrained by other people's conventions.

And that's how I see what Henry has done here, a theme of a new world and variations on the search for it.  How much more can one wave a middle finger at the modesty of establishment design than to build one's own glittering globe of a world and set it on the shoulders of a glass and steel Atlas, asserting itself over nearby rusted railings that still speak of boundaries and limits?  Let the engineers be ruled by the limits of tension and compression in the required materials.  No other restraint need be put on dreams of the promised land.

And then let's see how this theme looks in variation, how it glitters in the sun, is shrouded in the mist, sets off the clouds and glows from within at night.  What does the owner have up there?  Did he perhaps a pleasure dome decree?  What delights might we conceive in our own imaginations for such a pleasure dome, what little worlds of promise create?

Well it doesn't show me my promised land.  It doesn't show me Henry's either, I'm sure.  But while the man who commissioned it might tell us it is merely decoration, we all know there is no such thing as "merely" in decoration.  The more a statement is denied the plainer it is likely to be and this one speaks loudly of vainglory.

It will never find its promised land of course.  In a few years time rust and grime will streak that glass, the pleasure dome will be used to store janitor's supplies and the man who dreamed it will have abandoned it, forgotten himself most likely.  Disappointment always awaits such presumptions.

Yet he was searching and for that Henry has given him a recognition to which the man and many like him can still lay some claim.

"Promised Land"
- an introduction by Jake van der Kamp

Jake van der Kamp is a stockbroker turned prominent journalist and author.
He is a resident of Hong Kong for over thirty years, with Dutch and Canadian affiliations.