曾设计多座省博物馆，为何他说香港故宫一定不能像北京故宫？

"The whole building looks poised for take-off, just like the current status of Chinese culture," Rocco Yim explained to reporters as he stood in front of Hong Kong Palace Museum. As the architect, he knows the structure and details of the building well.

对于曾设计过广东省博物馆、云南省博物馆的严迅奇来说，五年时间来完成一座博物馆的设计和建造，也并不是易事。“这个项目是一个很大的挑战。”

Hong Kong Palace Museum is only one of Yim's astronomical masterpieces. He also designed the Guangdong Provincial Museum and the Yunnan Provincial Museum. Even for him, it was not an easy task to design and build a museum in 5 years.

"First of all, this building was not intended to resemble the Palace Museum in Beijing." The latter is a palace built 600 years ago, an ancient Chinese building, while the former is a museum that showcases the culture of the Forbidden City.

"Hence, this building not only has to conform with Hong Kong's metropolitan culture, but is also meant to remind people of the Beijing Palace Museum’s culture," Yim said. 

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In 1983, Yim won first prize in the international competition at the Bastille Opera in Paris, France. "It was difficult to win prizes at that time, when information was extremely underdeveloped, the development of modern architecture in the whole Asian region was lagging behind that of Western countries."

Following China’s reform and opening up, the country’s modern architectural design has improved significantly, and a large number of national construction projects have been completed.

It’s difficult to estimate where the level of development of the modern architecture on the Chinese mainland will be in the next 10 years; Yim said that "each building bears witness to the change of urban and social pursuits".

Yim has helped draw Hong Kong's outline by applying various architectural designs during his career over the past 40 years. "Personally speaking, we don't need to be overly worried about whether our products will be accepted by the West, since architecture's primary goal is to serve the local community and our own culture," he said.