Many of the wet market buildings in Asia seem built as an architectural tribute to the centrality of food in their respective cultures. Wan Chai Market in Hong Kong was no different. The old Wan Chai Market’s Streamline Moderne structure appeared progressive and contemporary on the outside; a triangular wedge of a building with the corners smoothly rounded off on the corner of Queen’s Road East in downtown Hong Kong. Science fiction writer William Gibson described the Streamline Moderne style as looking as if the buildings were designed as gun emplacements by Ming the Merciless from Buck Rogers, homesick for the style of his home planet Mongo. Built in 1937, the market building is one of the few remaining built remnants of that era with most of Hong Kong succumbing to the spread of the concrete and plexiglass skyscrapers that dominate the landscape.

From the 1930s onwards, the market contained the chaotic array of fresh food vendors that you would expect from one the world’s more food obsessed cities except for the period of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong when the basement was used as a makeshift mortuary.

Currently, the curvilinear facade of the market is coated in a wall of scaffolding and sea-green shadecloth. The original building is in the process of being hollowed out so that a 39-story “luxury residential-commercial complex” can rise in its place. The facade will be preserved but the original intent of the building is lost. While keeping the front of the building is something of a partial reprieve, its singular purpose has disappeared.

The Wan Chai Market vendors have moved across the road into an aluminium fronted, generic ground floor of an apartment complex. Air-conditioned and gleaming-clean, the market seems to have lost its soul. There is none of the vibrancy of a good wet market; the produce seems tired and the selection limited. Behind the building is the jumble of vendors, outdoor butchers and fishmongers that remind you of exactly how varied Chinese food in Hong Kong really is; a cornucopia of local and imported meats and vegetables on open display.

With the loss of a market like Wan Chai, there seems to be a palpable loss in importance of market vending in Hong Kong. There is still no shortage of outdoor, fresh and dried food vending across the island and in Kowloon and the New Territories  but as the architectural importance of market buildings decline, so does the real visibility and vibrancy of the food culture that a central market provides. Of course, there are some benefit in gentrifying markets, most noticeably, public hygiene, which on a crowded island like Hong Kong and in the wake of bird flu, cannot be sneezed at.

As food vending is pushed into the margins of buildings and further into generic supermarket chains, it does beg the question: is food becoming less central to cultures that don’t dedicate memorable architecture to food?