Monster Building

Where it sits. The Monster Building stands on King's Road in Quarry Bay, on the north shore of Hong Kong Island, about five minutes' walk west of Quarry Bay MTR station and a similar distance east of Tai Koo. Its official name is Parker Estate, after Mount Parker on the ridge behind it. From the street it reads as an ordinary run of shopfronts under a tall block; the effect that made it famous is only visible once you step through into one of the two long courtyards behind, where the walls close in on four sides and eighteen storeys of windows, cage balconies, drying poles and air-conditioning units rise straight up around a slot of sky.

How it got that way. The estate was built in the 1960s as a single development and in 1972 was divided into five separately owned blocks: the Fok Cheong Building, Montane Mansion, Oceanic Mansion, the Yick Cheong Building and the Yick Fat Building. They are arranged so that the towers enclose two north–south light wells, and because the blocks share walls, the enclosure is nearly complete. There are 2,243 flats across the five blocks, the tallest of them eighteen floors, and around ten thousand people live in the complex — a density that is high even by Hong Kong standards and that is precisely what the photographs record. Everything that makes the façades visually extraordinary is functional: metal window grilles for security, cantilevered cages for storage and plants, bamboo drying poles projecting into the void, and split air-conditioning units bolted wherever a wall would take them. Nothing about it was designed to be looked at.

On screen. The complex acquired its international profile in 2013, when a photograph by Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze went viral and then became the cover image of his book Vertical Horizon. Film work followed. The Hong Kong sequence of Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) used the estate during its city-wide battle, and the 2017 live-action Ghost in the Shell built on it heavily, using the real façades as the foundation for a digitally augmented future city — one of several places where that film borrowed Hong Kong's built texture and relabelled it. Music videos have used it repeatedly, among them Labyrinth by Mondo Grosso with Hikari Mitsushima, and Cave Me In by Gallant and Eric Nam. It is worth being clear about what the screen credits actually mean here: in most of these productions the building is a starting point that gets extended, duplicated and recoloured in post-production, so what you see on film is more extreme than what stands on King's Road. The nickname Monster Building, sometimes Monster Mansion, is a visitor coinage rather than anything the residents chose.

What visiting is actually like. This is private residential property, not an attraction. There is no ticket, no barrier and no opening time; you walk in off King's Road through a gap between shops. What you find is a working courtyard: postboxes, bicycles, a hardware shop, people carrying groceries home, and a steady churn of visitors pointing cameras upward. Residents have put up signs asking for quiet and for restraint, and management has periodically clamped down on photography in the courtyards, particularly around 2019 and 2020 when volumes became unmanageable. The reasonable approach is to keep visits short, stay out of lift lobbies and stairwells, avoid tripods and flash, and not photograph into windows. Early morning and late evening are when residents most want the space to themselves.

Light and technique. The courtyards are deep and narrow, which means direct sun reaches the floor for only a short period around midday and the rest of the time you are working with reflected light and a very high contrast ratio between the shaded walls and the bright slot of sky. Overcast days are easier than clear ones. The standard composition is a straight-up shot from the centre of the well, but the more interesting frames are usually from the corners, where the blocks step and the geometry breaks. The green and cream paint on some blocks and the ochre on others give each courtyard a slightly different cast.

The neighbourhood and getting there. Quarry Bay is a working district of the eastern harbourfront, formerly the site of the Taikoo dockyard and sugar refinery, now a mix of office towers, old walk-ups and the enormous Taikoo Shing housing estate. Quarry Bay station on the Island and Tseung Kwan O lines is the closest, exit A, from which you turn west along King's Road; trams run along the same street from Central and are a slow, pleasant approach. The Hong Kong Film Archive at Sai Wan Ho is two stops away for anyone chasing the city's cinema history, and Tai Koo's parks and the Quarry Bay promenade are within a short walk. Ground level is flat and step-free, but there is nothing to see beyond the courtyards themselves.