Outside the office window, the sun fades to black and a neon sign flickers to life. The words DB Schenker illuminate the sky in bright red and white. The signage for the German logistics firm is symbolic of the international supply and demand business that modern Hong Kong was founded on, and the presence of such multinational businesses says much about Jack So Chak-kwong and his diverse career. International business is just one of many spheres that So has been involved with. His many other professional undertakings have had a far-reaching impact on the lives of Hong Kong people and the city.

Now in his early ’60s, So says he lives by the principle of being prepared. Preparation, he says, cuts stress and allows for fewer surprises. Not surprisingly, then, he talks with the ease of a seasoned professional. Besides, he confides, doing interviews offers a respite from his packed schedule. Chatting with The PEAK about his life and professional career seems a relaxing bridge to dinner.

Not that So would ever “de-busy’’ his life. Though a keen swimmer and golfer, free time has him twitching. He can’t stand being idle. He recalls how once he embarked on a cruise, but found three days away from email insufferable and he jumped ship. His mentor, the late Fung King-hei, founder of the former Sun Hung Kai Securities, with whom So worked early on, passed on to his protégé a crucial bit of advice. So learns forward to dispense it. His eyes grow slim. “There is plenty of time to rest after you are dead. When you are alive, work hard and play hard,” he says and then leans back with a wide, satisfied smile.

Now back as chairman for a second stint with the Hong Kong Trade Development Council, So also leads the Hong Kong Film Development Council. He advises an international bank and is on the board of some multinationals. For better or worse, he is a corporate man.

So graduated from University of Hong Kong, followed by a diploma at Cambridge. While there he qualified as a solicitor. He did not practice the law because, his face crinkles into a delighted grin: “I hate to read small print.”

Public service   
Instead he took on a meaningful role with the government in the 1970s.  In charge of clearing sprawling squatter settlements, his job was to rehouse people, although, he recalls, there were police-accompanied exercises to evict reluctant, sometimes knife-wielding die-hards.

From there, he joined leading securities firm SHK, where he helped set up trading counters for Hong Kong shares in London and New York, propelling the beginnings of an internationalised Hong Kong stock market. So later helped broker the monumental deal that would make Hong Kong famous in the financial world.

He terms the experience a fascinating coincidence. “We were walking along Fifth Avenue deciding between going to Saks to buy a tie, or somewhere near to have a coffee. I suggested going to Citibank,” he recalls. “I called up the chairman Walter Wriston – he’d just been in Hong Kong – and he happened to be in his office. We had to find something to say. Mr Fung told me he wanted to buy a US securities company, and I said, no don’t say that – that’s too pompous,’’ So gives a throaty chuckle at this.

“As I was doing the translation, I told the chairman of the biggest bank in the US,  we wanted to cooperate with a US securities house. Almost immediately we were sent to see the chairman of Merrill Lynch in Wall Street.

This started a six-month long negotiation resulting in a share-swap. The transaction made Mr Fung the single largest shareholder of the largest US securities firm. Lesson of the story: Nothing is impossible.

Steering initiatives
The rest of So’s past undertakings is equally inspiring.

In the mid-’80s he joined TDC for the first time, as executive director, with an idea to start major trade fairs. He was a major driving force for the construction of phase one of the Convention and Exhibition Centre. Then in the ’90s he joined the MTR and led the development of the Airport Express and the Octopus card. Later, while at PCCW he helped set up Now TV, the word’s first pay IPTV station.

During these ventures he  mingled with a wide cross section of Hong Kong’s business community, as well as royalty, political giants, and heads of financial superpowers.

Yet as he sits recounting these tales today on the 39th floor office of the TDC, he underplays the successes. For the most part he will not be scotched into singling out particular moments of pride, saying most ideas came from group discussions with staff and he merely puts them into action. “I will take credit for ‘the hunch,’’’ he admits, meaning those ideas which he felt would run, and there is obvious glee about the Octopus card.

“It started off as just a transport ticket but I insisted that it must get out of the train station and get into retail.’’ He even gave it a Chinese name – Bart Dart Tung – meaning going places. But generally, he will not be drawn into self-admiration.

“I was lucky,” he says. “I think my generation in general was very lucky. During the last 30 years of my working life is when Hong Kong really developed. We were on the forefront of every single change. Everywhere I went I was lucky. Everywhere I went I had very intelligent staff, with really good ideas and I only have to listen.”

Why did he return to the TDC? “The government asked me to come back – to work for free,” he jokes. Then, suddenly serious, “I love this organisation, I think its doing a great job, particularly at this juncture when Hong Kong is facing change from an export-led economy to a service economy.”

So says he is no job hopper, but he suffers a disease normally afflicting couples – the ‘seven year itch.’ He loves big business, with an organised structure – the reason he never projected his energies into his own business – but when excitement in a position fades, usually around the seven-year mark, So is out. “After that I find I am a little dry, stale. I hate coming to the office knowing it’ll be more of the same ... Having moved out of TDC for the last 20 years, now I am totally recharged.” He throws back his head. “I got some new ideas!” he says.

Often, when he has a laugh, the jokes are aimed at himself. At a talk he gave at Hong Kong University, his message was “Have a dream, work smart, take risk, build an image, manage your relationship, and (if you can’t do any of those) be philosophical and don’t take life too seriously.”

He says he tries to keep most of his meetings under two hours and splices them with jokes. Humour helps him face adversity.

The year 2009 proved ripe for debate. The projected phase III expansion of the Convention and Exhibition Centre stirred accusations that the TDC is dominating the trade fairs business and sucking business from private organisers. So maintains that despite holding some of the world’s largest fairs, popular events still have waiting lists in the hundreds, and warns Hong Kong could lose out if it does not keep up with competition from Macau, Guangzhou and Singapore.

As for competing with private sector fairs, So shrugs. “Our mandate is to help Hong Kong’s SMEs. There is no secrecy about the TDC’s objectives. What we do is 100 per cent for the good of Hong Kong, there is no profit-motive for anybody here.”

Discussing his other public role, we focus on his job as chairman of the Film Development Council. A self-professed film-lover, So hatched the idea for the organisation with Peter Lam Kin-ngok and other film buffs in response to the decline in homegrown films. So far, the council has funded 14 films, whose producers pay back when they profit.
So happily reports that the council is yet to lose a penny, and although the term “local’’ now embraces mainland co-productions, he expects the industry’s growth to foster new talent and boost the film industry. 

In close up
He does not have the public persona of someone like, say, Chief Secretary Henry Tang Ying-yen and he is not as publicly celebrated as the top tycoons. Yet on a normal day, an average person might watch news on Now TV and step out of his apartment in a Kowloon station for the Airport Express line, built during So’s tenure at MTR, and swipe his Octopus card at the turnstile. At an office in ifc he’ll check stock prices on a mobile phone and plan a meeting at the CEC, bringing him or her into contact with So’s past initiatives five times before 9 am. That’s some life story.

No film of it is planned yet, but a book may be in the making. So says he has been asked to pen a biography and at one stage might tackle it. Given it is on his “to do’’ list, we might reasonably expect this to happen. After all, he has been back at the TDC for two years. Give it another five and he’ll be itching to try something fresh.

David Yeo, founder of Aqua Group and former Marine Police chief and historian Iain Ward, historical consultant to Hullett House, retrace the steps leading to the creation of Hullett House, a boutique hotel in the Former Marine Police Headquarters. The hotel, a work in progress, has 10 rooms and five restaurants, each referencing stages of Hong Kong’s cultural past, from turn-of-the-century Chinese and 1930s Shanghai to British colonial days.  When The PEAK caught up with the duo, Ward was staying in a room which he remembers he had occupied in 1967.

The PEAK: Is it more difficult working on a heritage project?
David Yeo:  Yes. In here [the Mariners’ Rest bar, a recreation of the former sergeants’ mess] we are waiting for photographs and pub paraphernalia.

The PEAK: Demolishing the hill attracted criticism. What did you think?
Iain Ward: The architect Daniel Lim showed me the model he’d made six years ago now, and I gave it a negative “wow”, but I took a second look and I thought it was incredibly clever.

The PEAK: Why?
Ward: Well, you have to make the space pay – this is Hong Kong after all. So what he did was re-build the hill out of shops.  Now if you stand at the bottom and look up you get a vision of this building that no one has seen for years.

The PEAK: So you like the finished project?
Ward: I feel really weird walking around – they’ve kept it so well I keep thinking I might bump into the barrack sergeant at any minute.

The PEAK: The marine police lobbied and got the building listed in 1995 when they found out the original plan was to be a bus shelter...
Ward: We managed to get this headquarters listed about six months before the marine police marched out of here forever.

The PEAK: So how did you become involved with the hotel?
Ward: (Laughs) I think they wanted some instant history.
Yeo: I had heard about his books, but I thought he was some kind of academic. (Ward is author of two books, Sui Geng, which is now out of print, and Mariners: The Hong Kong Marine Police 1948-1997).
Ward: (Laughs) Oh my Goodness!
Yeo: I asked Richard (Richard Ward, Yeo’s Aqua Group partner) to find out whether you were still alive ...
Ward: He Googled me apparently...
Yeo: We had a view to initially buying your book to stock. From then we found there was an earlier one...
Ward: In fact I gave Richard one of the last copies I had ...
Yeo: (Nods) Which I have told him he has to surrender so that we can put it in a glass case or something...
Ward: Anyway, It was a meeting of minds – we talked a lot about Hong Kong as a whole really. We didn’t spend a great deal of time talking about the hotel.
Yeo: He told us about the pigeons in the courtyard and so that got named the 50 pigeons courtyard.
Ward: I fairly quickly learnt that it didn’t matter what I wanted with David around (laughs) because he’ll do what he wants, but we did decide that we definitely wanted a ‘Mariners’ Rest’. We said we wouldn’t ‘play’ anymore unless they gave us a Mariners’ Rest! It was the spirit of the marines.

The PEAK: Why was that?
Ward: For a long time this was immigration because people could only arrive by ship. An officer would board and he’d have his little bag of chops and he’d go up and down stamping papers. Therefore he’d meet a lot of sailors and captains and if he liked them he’d invite them for a drink in the mess. They’d come again and again, so you’d have an international clientele arriving to drink at the mess.
Yeo: We did discuss Hullett House … the name.
Ward: One of the first questions he asked me was where the H’s came from. (These symbols were worked into gates at the headquarters). Quite frankly I had no idea, and I still don’t know. I thought maybe the Hung Hom ironworks did it...
Yeo:  I think there was a push to call it 1881 Heritage Hotel, but I didn’t think it captured the spirit of the place, and in any case the building opened in 1884...
Ward: Well 1881 sounds better than 1884 in Chinese, although the planning for it started in 1881 so they can just about legitimately say that... which is fair enough.

The PEAK: So why Hullett?
Yeo: We traced back to the Bauhinia and one version of the Bauhinia was cross-bred by a Victorian school master surnamed Hullett. He was a keen botanist ...

The PEAK: The headquarters was famed for its plants and trees...
Ward: Earlier I mentioned all the sailors that used to come in here and somewhere along the line someone mentioned that they should bring in a contribution, so they all brought in plants. When we had all the grounds they were full of strange and exotic plants that didn’t come from Hong Kong. A fisheries report noted 39 species not native to Hong Kong.

The PEAK: Was too much destroyed?
Ward: How much do you keep? Hong Kong has never had much room for sentiment. Its only since it’s become wealthier that there has been any room for sentiment.

The PEAK: That’s presumably why the notion of preservation occurred relatively late?
Ward: Until the Communists took over, Hong Kong was a place that Europeans and Chinese came to make money. Some would spend their entire lives here, although they never planned on spending their entire lives here. It wasn’t until 1949 that you actually started having “Hong Kong people”who had no where else to go and that first generation didn’t grow up until the ’60s, so they just didn’t think of it. That’s my theory anyway...
Yeo: I said in my initial presentation I wanted this building to be unique for Hong Kong, but you can’t keep something just because its old, it has to be worth keeping and the best way to preserve something is to make it part of everyday life.
Ward: It is working. There is never a moment of the night and day when people aren’t having pictures taken. I’ve seen graduations, weddings, school children. It’s undoubtedly beginning to bite into the Hong Kong consciousness.

Architect Ole Scheeren is attempting to represent the ‘inner life’ of a city in a building through his newest project in Asia – another towering landmark

Perhaps better known as world-renowned actress Maggie Cheung’s boyfriend, Ole Scheeren never settles for less as a German architect, while his partnership with Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture since 2002 has elevated him to an even higher ground on the world stage.

“Koolhaas and I would do certain projects like West Kowloon and Taipei Theatre together,” Scheeren says. “While for some, we’d do independently … like the ones in Bangkok and Singapore are done by me.”

Educated at the universities of Lausanne and Karlsruhe, Scheeren graduated from the Architectural Association in London and received the RIBA Silver Medal.

His previous stunning works include the Prada Epicenters in New York City (2001) and Los Angeles (2004), plus other projects like the Beijing Books Building, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Leeum Cultural Centre in Seoul, and a master plan for Penang Island, Malaysia which swiftly put him on the world’s architecture stage.

Scheeren is now in charge of OMA’s work across Asia, and led the design and construction of the China Central Television Station tower and the Television Cultural Centre  in Beijing.

But the fire that caused one death and six injuries at a hotel near the CCTV building in February last year left Scheeren worried, since he believes CCTV is one of the most important projects in terms of broadcast technology, process and scale.

“It was an impactful and tragic moment to see that happen,” Scheeren recalls. “But we are now waiting to start the repairs and put that back to its original state, while still working on the interior setup for CCTV, which is expected to be completed later this year.”

His current projects include MahaNakhon, a 77-storey mixed use tower in Bangkok, set to become the tallest building in the Thai capital. Planned for completion 2012, it promises to be an architectural landmark.

“There is often zero contact between the inside and outside of a building,” Scheeren remarks. “So I want to rethink how I can open up the city and building components with some pixillated geometry to encourage more public activities.”

According to OMA, the tower, “with its distinctive sculptural appearance, it has been carefully carved to introduce a three-dimensional ribbon of architectural ‘pixels’ that circle the tower’s full height, as if excavating portions of the elegant glass curtain wall to reveal the inner life of the building’’.

“The shafts would start to inhabit the tower, so it’s not only the large scale of the tower but also the small scale, the pedestrian, starts to become part of the tower, which brings it into a very dynamic and lively language,” Scheeren says.

The development will include the Ritz-Carlton Residences, a public square, a luxury retail area and a five-star boutique hotel.

On the other hand, two projects in Singapore are also prompting Scheeren to consider the meaning of living – The Scotts Tower, featuring high-end residential apartments, and Gillman Heights, a 1,000-unit large-scale residential complex, which is a relatively low-end project.

“It is interesting to explore not only at the high end market, but also seeing what we can do at an affordable level,” Scheeren says.

All three projects are in the tropics and deal with tropical living.

“And the beauty and power of nature, transitions between inside and outside, and in a way a particular form of energy and sustainability of a tropical life. To be active, and use the street and space in multiple ways.”

Tropical architecture is not so much about sunshades and how to deal with the direct effect of climate on architecture according to Scheeren. “It has the ability to improvise to invent and redefine things in a way that is unparallel to other parts of the world.”

Other cultural projects are also underway. Early last year, OMA won the competition to design the Taipei Performing Arts Centre. “It is three different types of theatres combined into one building,” he elaborates.

Then there is the Crystal Island in Shenzhen. “This is an exercise in imagining a new centre of the newest city in China. I live in Beijing and I work in Beijing, an old and established centre with formal and monumental setting,” he says. “Yet Shenzhen features a different set of dynamics. Extremely young and rapidly-changing, which helps me to build a non-monumental centre of equal importance defined by its cultural activities.”

“I’d suggest to use this project to refocus Shenzhen’s identity, the way from its history of manufacturing much more towards a creative industry. Shenzhen was awarded in 2008  the title ‘city of design’ so we can see a formality there.”

OMA has also been engaged as one of the three master planners for the West Kowloon Cultural District. “This project obviously is on a larger scale but the question remains how Hong Kong can be a cultural hub not only for itself but also the Pan-Asian region and even internationally.”

But he would not disclose further details. “The organiser has given us a relatively precise framework for the project and we are starting to work on our first design idea. While the public consultation has also started and we are having informal meetings with key players from the art and culture scene to understand more about the potential.”

This multi-tasking architect handles stress in his own way. “It’s a very intense process requiring a huge amount of flexibility, an incredible level of focus. There is a lot of switching between things and you have to be aware that many things have to be parallel at the same time,” he says.   “Each moment I have to be able to dive in and focus on one specific issue. And at the same time, I have to pull out myself and look at the project as a whole.”

And there are often different projects to handle in one go. “It’s a big challenge for this multiple engagement but it’s also interesting to learn across these projects, while we wouldn’t lose our oversight like others given our well defined number of projects with my team of 30 to 50 people at our Beijing office.”

Previously he worked for architecture firms in Germany; collaborated with 2x4, a graphic design firm in New York; and was engaged in a range of projects through his own studio in the United Kingdom. He has been involved in various art projects and exhibitions, such as Cities on the Move in London and Bangkok, Media City Seoul and the Rotterdam Film Festival.

Scheeren's work is featured in the collections of major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He also writes and lectures.

“It’s indeed hard to separate between work and leisure, as I get to see the same people every day,” he says, smiling.