'Constructing Climate: The Hong Kong Observatory and meteorological networks within the British imperial sphere, 1842 – 1912.'

Abstract

Meteorology emerged as an important science in late nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong. It deepened imperial knowledge concerning the environmental forces affecting the colony’s economic, political, and social affairs and the region at large. This research examines the historical study of the weather through the architecture that enabled it, namely, the design and construction of the Hong Kong Observatory, initiated in 1879 at the behest of the London-based Meteorological Society and eventually completed in 1885. Overlooked in the architectural history of colonial Hong Kong and Britain’s imperial sphere, the observatory’s history offers insight into the spaces, systems, instruments, and data that defined the colony’s climate and proved critical to Hong Kong’s governance, commercial culture, and physical development over time. More generally, the entwinement of environmental science and the built environment that took place in and through the Hong Kong Observatory illuminates architecture’s role in what may be understood as the conceptual construction of climate — a systematic process of collecting, documenting, organising, and translating meteorological data over time into what was understood to be an ordered form of weather-related, atmospheric knowledge. Architecture’s contribution to such processes was significant; understanding it allows for a reconsideration of the historical relationship between buildings, climate, and our planet.