Wet and Modern Architecture (This week's Photo Hunt themes)

Back when Taipei 101 was the tallest building in the world (rather than number 6, like it is now), my mother and I went on a vacation to Taiwan's capital city.  In some ways, late December 2007 was a good time to visit: among other things, Taiwan's one of those countries where December 25 is not a public holiday, so museums and many other attractions were open as usual rather than closed for the holidays.  

On the other hand, despite December in Taipei not supposed to be as wet as many other months of the year, it rained a lot while we were there (including on the days when we visited both Taiwan's prime example of modern architecture, Taipei 101, and the far more traditionally looking Lungshan Temple).

Despite it being ultra-wet when we visited, I still got much out of our visits to both those Taipei landmarks, including some cool photos. (Incidentally, yes, I could have used just photos from my Taipei trip for this entry for Sandi's and Gattina's Photo Hunts but decided to go for a bit more geographic variety!) 

This was particularly so at atmospheric Lungshan Temple, which I would happily have spent more time photographing if my mother had not been champing at the bit to go somewhere else!  But while my mother and I enjoyed going up to the observation floor of Taipei 101 in its super fast elevator and then walking around and viewing the rest of city from up on high, doing so only got us thinking that as far as tall buildings and other examples of modern architecture go, Hong Kong actually impresses way more.

Sure, "Asia's World City" has never had a building that held the title of world's tallest but Hong Kong easily tops the list of cities with the most skyscrapers.  And although there are people who like to criticize its modern architecture as being on the visually boring or uninspired side, I reckon that some of them, including that which is its currently Hong Kong's tallest building, actually don't look all that bad, be it during the day or at night.

At the very least, I do like that the International Commerce Centre is part of a complex with other tall buildings near it. To my way of thinking, this makes it look less ridiculous and an "ego-product", the way that buildings built to tower over everything and look like they're standing in isolation are -- like *cough, cough* my home state's 60-storey-high Kompleks Tun Abdul Razak (KOMTAR), which sticks out like a sore thumb on the cultural heritage-rich George Town landscape even now, close to 40 years after it was first built! :S