Andrew Clark plays basketball in the atrium of the Woodward's building on a mural placed on the ground to mark World Sight Day, in Vancouver, British Columbia, Tuesday, Oct 17, 2017.[Photo/IC]

Many buildings are bulldozed to make way for redevelopment, but the structures can actually avoid the wrecking ball and be improved through a better expression of history and culture with modern art.

That idea of focusing on the "emotional resonance" of space, beyond its functionality, was one of the takeaways from an urban design conference in late September in Beijing.

The event, hosted by the Elle Decoration magazine with manufacturing company Kohler at the Chao Hotel in the capital's Sanlitun area, involved four professional hotel designers from Hong Kong, as well as Singapore and the United States, discussing the latest developments in the industry.

Hong Kong's Ed Ng, who founded the architectural and interior design company AB Concept, says trends certainly never last forever. Design trends run like a circle－people's daily lives are filled with modern technology and that leads to their hunger for "old techniques".

Ng says that minimalism was everywhere. Then people got tired and wanted something new. "Now we can smell the resurgence of classicism; not the style completely, but its elements."

The speakers at the event hailed that conservatism, the avant-garde, history and the contemporary do not have to run counter to one another. Hotel designers, for example, can choose to transform a space based on its original building, rather than construct something totally new. Injecting new vitality into the space with respect to its history can help "trigger" more identity and resonance.