By Lilit Marcus, CNN
(CNN) — A pawn shop. A firecracker factory. A cattle yard. These are elements of a great city’s past, but what about the future?
These days, Macau residents are more likely to be graphic designers, marketing executives or small business owners than they are to be farmers or factory workers. So Macao, Asia’s first European settlement, has gotten creative, repurposing its many old buildings to serve a new generation of locals without losing its sense of history.
According to Wei Jen Wang, a professor at the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Architecture, Macao’s well-preserved core owes much to Portugal and China’s willingness to work together.
A peninsula and pair of islands in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, just across the water from Hong Kong, Macao was an important shipping and trading center. It remained a major international trade hub through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, eventually becoming a point of pride for Portugal as its last remaining colony.
Meanwhile, just across the water, British-controlled Hong Kong was more focused on becoming a global commerce hub than preserving its historic architecture.
Ahead of Macao’s return to Chinese rule in 1999, the Portuguese government began laying out a comprehensive plan to preserve the city’s heritage buildings. Following the handover, Chinese officials kept much of that existing legislation in place and then built on it.
“The Portuguese set a good foundation and then the Chinese added to it in order to create this story of east meeting west,” Wang says. “I think Macao historically and culturally did a much better job than Hong Kong. Macao kept things very very strict. It’s almost overregulated.”
The crowning achievement of that work came in 2005, when the historic center of Macao was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. The announcement suited both groups: the Portuguese were happy that their heritage in Asia would be protected and acknowledged, while the Chinese could now boast a UNESCO site that was relatively easy for foreign tourists to visit, as Macao doesn’t require visas for most Western travelers.
Another point of pride: Hong Kong doesn’t have any UNESCO World Heritage sites.
In Wang’s opinion, the best example of reimagined architecture in Macao is the former Iec Long Firecracker Factory.
Firecrackers are big business in China — they’re present at nearly every significant celebration or event, like Lunar New Year, as people believe the loud noises scare away evil spirits.
Iec Long, on the southern island of Taipa, was the largest of these factories in Macao. But as gaming became the most profitable industry in the city, they began closing down, Iec Long included.
Wang remembers visiting Iec Long in the 2000s, when it was a series of abandoned stone buildings starting to be subsumed by the wet, marshy land around it, making the whole thing feel like “a jungle.”
In 2022, this area got a new life. A 400-meter (1,300-foot) raised wooden platform walkway was built to link the remaining structures together, creating a wetland park crossed with a museum.
“The wooden path is great,” says Wang. “I’m very glad it’s a public space. The big trees there, the density, it’s a bit of an oasis.”
The reimagined factory is just down the road from Taipa Food Street, a noisy, busy area packed with food stalls and late-night revelers. Yet it manages to feel like a totally separate neighborhood. Wang hopes that it will serve as an example of how other heritage areas can be reimagined.
San Ma Lo (“New Boulevard” in Cantonese), Macao’s main thoroughfare and near its former red-light district, is an incubator for some of the city’s most interesting new projects.
Among these is Kam Pek Market a multi-story food hall which began life as a gambling hall before being turned into community center.
“We wanted to bring what’s happening on street level into the interior so it would have a seamless connection,” says Briar Hickling, co-founder of the design firm Linehouse, which handled the project. The result is 16 spots for food concessions, a bar, and seating areas. Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese options are on offer, with a range of prices meaning that locals can afford to go just as easily as a high roller who’s in town to gamble.
While some adaptive reuse buildings around Macao are owned and managed by the city government, Kam Pek was an exception — it’s owned by the SJM Resorts group, which also runs some of the city’s biggest casinos, notably the Grand Lisboa Palace.
“They’ve taken it on themselves to give these buildings a different life,” Hickling adds. “Their ambitions as a developer were to rejuvenate this area as a gastronomic landmark in Macao, skipping the usual typologies you see of new hospitality and architecture that can be quite garish.”
Hickling and her team kept many of the building’s original features, namely its 1920s exterior, while adding new entryways and accessible bathrooms. The result is “echoing the past while thinking about the future,” she says.
The easiest and fastest way to adapt a building is to convert it into a museum, which is what happened with Tak Seng On, a former pawnshop that is now a museum about the history of the industry.
While pawnshops are stigmatized in the West, they were an important part of daily life in southern China. Without traditional banks to loan money and give out mortgages, many people relied on pawnshops as a way to get the cash to start a business or make an important purchase.
They also have a unique architectural style. Cantonese pawnshops are easy buildings to spot — they have a large, high wall inside the entrance to help keep goods secure and owners safe. Outside, a distinctively shaped sign, designed to look like an upside-down bat holding a coin, means that even someone who can’t read Chinese characters can easily recognize the business.
However, the advent of banks in southern China — not to mention online payment apps — has made pawnshops less common. Rather than demolish this one, just down the road from Kam Pek Market, the city converted it into a museum. Now, visitors can see the traditional items that pawnbrokers used in their work, like metal scales for weighing goods and tickets for keeping track of items, as well as understand the history of these businesses during the colonial era.
Macao’s agricultural history is mostly in the past, although there are small remnants of it left if you know where to look, such as the occasional stray “no cattle crossing” sign on a narrow road.
One of these leftover pieces of Macao’s farming past, though, has been creatively transformed. A former cattle shed in northern Macao’s historic Mong-Ha neighborhood, it’s been a dedicated studio and gallery space for contemporary art since 2003.
Any Macao resident can apply for space at the former cattle stable. The building’s best-known tenant is the aptly named Ox Warehouse, which stages shows by artists from around China and the rest of the world.
In a city where 700,000 people are densely packed into about 13 square miles, having dedicated space for artists to work is invaluable. It also means there might be a young Macao resident who is working on the city’s next big adaptive reuse project already.
Hickling, the designer, says she’s optimistic about where Macao is going.
“There’s a possibility and opportunity to be much more thoughtful about the types of architecture they could be doing in Macao,” she says. “It’s nice to give life to these historical facades. It’s nice to see that they are taking the initiative. It gives Macao a bigger sense of identity.”
The-CNN-Wire
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