BUILDING ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI CHURCH AND SCHOOL IN HONG KONG

Emergence of Church and School Complex in the 1950s

Abstract

 In the 1950s in Hong Kong, the Catholic Church devised a new type of church building, Church and School Complex. St. Francis of Assisi Church and School was one of such complexes (1955). It was engineered because of increasing refugee population, a free school space granted by the government as the result of inter-dependent Church-government relations, and Church’s own efforts to procure funds. The architect Chien Nai-jen designed this complex in adaptive Chinese style presumably because of his deep exposure from the 1930s to 50s to such architectural movement in China, the U.S. and Hong Kong.