Air conditioning is a bit like a narcotic: once it claws its way into your life, you begin changing yourself to accommodate its demands. When air conditioning became common in Hong Kong, it changed the very fabric of the city, shrinking windows, destroying verandahs, turning streets into dripping, humming corridors meant to serve the useful space, which moved indoors.
In the past, Hong Kong architecture emphasized shade and ventilation, with arcaded sidewalks and large windows. The new architecture of A/C turned its back on these traditional ways of coping with a hot climate, eventually creating a city that struggles with a severe urban heat island effect and wall-like buildings that block the wind and trap pollution.
In the most remote corner of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale’s West Kowloon site, three architects, Kingsley Ng, Syren Johnstone and Daniel Patzold, are digging up Hong Kong’s heritage from virgin land. The concept: it’s several centuries into the future and an old street market has been discovered, leading to an archaeological race to save what remains of it.
Artifacts from the Central street market are scattered around the dig, including an old green market booth the team brought in from Gutzlaff Street. It now sits incongruously in an open plain with the giant glass-and-stall wall of the just-built International Commerce Centre rising incongruously behind it.
“When something like this is in the market, you don’t notice because it’s a shitty old thing, but when you move it here, you start seeing all of the details. There’s a lot of stories here,” says Johnstone. “If we found an old market 350 years in the future, we would want to preserve and protect the ruins. Why not today for the markets that still exist?”
Last Sunday, Clara Lee and her nine-year-old daughter Hoi-ching were wandering through the craggy grass and gnarly trees that make up the West Kowloon site of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture.
“It’s big here!” exclaimed Hoi-ching. “I don’t often go to the countryside.”
“Actually,” said her mother, “this is not the countryside. We’re in the city.”
Hoi-ching looked up, perplexed. “But it feels like the country.”
She could be excused for being mistaken. After it was created from landfill fifteen years ago, parts of West Kowloon were developed with malls and highrises, while a narrow strip of waterfront was recently converted into a public park and promenade. But most of it was simply fenced off and left fallow; land reclaimed from the sea was gradually reclaimed by nature. With the totems of Hong Kong finance soaring at either end of the site, it’s an odd experience to wander along a dirt road past wild grass, untamed shrubs and the sound of crickets buzzing in the sun.
GlobalPost’s Nick Miroff brings us this nice audio slideshow of Havana’s old cinemas — gorgeous Art Deco and Streamline Moderne relics that were once, as he reports, living rooms for the entire city. Some have been converted to other uses, but many still show movies, albeit in a kind of quiet decrepitude, with ticket prices frozen at the same rate as decades past.
“In Cuba, the creative destruction of capitalism isn’t there, so the past never really goes away, it just remains in the present, like the city’s old American automobiles. Cuban socialist aspirations have always been haunted by reminders of a more prosperous time.”
Hong Kong is a city where the creativity of capitalism has been given free reign (unlike creativity of other kinds, which have traditionally been looked down upon). Nearly all of the city’s free-standing theatres and cinemas have been destroyed, though the Yaumatei Theatre, a hybrid neoclassical/Art Deco building that is Hong Kong’s only surviving prewar cinema, is now being restored.
There is not much to indicate that the rundown shophouse on Shanghai Street in Mongkok houses anything but a pawn shop.
On the third floor, however, is Tong Saam, an unmarked space that has positioned itself on Hong Kong’s creative vanguard. Since it was opened earlier this year by three friends interested in music and art, it has hosted film screenings and performances by underground folk singers such a Beijing’s Zhao Yiran.
“Normally, you’d only be able to find this kind of space in an industrial area,” says one of Tong Saam’s founders, Charlie Wong Liang-yih, a freelance designer. “It’s the perfect size and even has a balcony. Being in Mong Kok makes it even more special because it’s so central and we’re part of a real neighbourhood. Places like the Cattle Depot [Artists' Village in To Kwa Wan] are like warehouses for artists. This is more like a community space.”
For all its ambitions, though, Tong Saam might soon be redeveloped. Shortly after they moved in, Wong and his partners heard rumours that the Urban Renewal Authority was planning a new project on the street. Even if that did not turn out to be the case, it was likely that other URA projects in the area would drive up prices and encourage owners to sell their properties to developers, he said. “We’re surrounded by redevelopment projects,” Wong said.
Tong Saam is not the only new venture to open in a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment.
When the curators of the 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale began assembling exhibits for the urbanism and architecture showcase, they decided to focus on the theme of sustainability. It turns out that most of the artists, architects and designers who answered their call for submissions had the same idea.
“It’s almost a zeitgeist,” says Eric Schuldenfrei, one of the biennale’s four curators. “When you ask people for new work, the dialogue with nature is very strong. It might be subtle, but if you look for it, there is that element in almost every project in the biennale. It’s curated to an extent, but it’s also what everyone was already working on.”
Sustainability might be a buzzword, but the philosophy behind it goes far beyond a bit of greenery here and there. A scan of the biennale’s lengthy roster of exhibitions, installations, lectures and events shows a preoccupation with the question of how to reduce Hong Kong’s impact on the environment and bring city-dwellers back into contact with nature.
Earlier this week, Montreal’s city council approved the development of two 32-storey Waldorf-Astoria hotel and condominium towers near the corner of Guy and Sherbrooke streets. The Gazette accompanied this announcement with a rendering of two massive, gaudy, post-modern towers; if they are vaguely reminiscent of the famous Waldorf-Astoria in New York, it’s only a coincidence, since the rendering has been recycled since at least the early 2000s, when the tower was first proposed but before the luxury hotel chain got involved.
Though the new development was approved by the council without debate, I’m sure its mass will elicit protests from those who are generally opposed to new highrises, especially those that might block the view of Mount Royal from certain angles. Putting aside the question of its architecture or function, however, I think this kind of building is exactly what the area needs.
The best way to learn about a city is to simply wander the streets: eventually, something will catch your attention, like an odd-looking cornice or the way a road curves, and you’ll ask yourself why it is the way it is. Idle curiosity is how I began my research on Montreal’s street signs and Hong Kong’s rooftops. For David Bellis, who runs the Hong Kong heritage websiteGwulo, it was an architectural flourish that led him to wonder about three streets in Causeway Bay.
Halfway between the shopping hubs of Times Square and Sogo, on the corner of Yun Ping and Lan Fong roads, is a smart-looking, vaguely Art Deco building that serves as a hotel. At first glance, it seems to be an older postwar building that was recently restored; its architecture is in the same half-Deco, half-Modernist style that was popular here in the 1950s. This structure, though, is particularly sleek and not as utilitarian as most, with clean lines that curve gracefully around the building’s corner edge.
Curious about what the building his great-great-grandfather lived in was like, ex-Brooklynite Zach van Schouwen was soon researching the history of his entire street. The result is “The Block,” a series pen-and-ink drawings of how the stretch of Eldridge Street, between Stanton and Rivington on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, looked in every year since 1795.
Eldridge turns out to be fairly typical of the neighborhood, which evolved from “Delancey’s Farm” to a series of tall, narrow tenements that start replacing the street’s small rowhouses in the 1850s. Fire escapes begin to appear, in accordance with law, in the 1920s and 30s. The block takes a downward turn just after World War II, when a number of tenements are gradually boarded up, torn down, and replaced with garages and storage facilities. In 1985, the entire block becomes occupied by a single housing project.
Ordos 100 project architects wander the emptiness of Inner Mongolia. Photo by Flickr user mi schoner
In August, I came across an intriguing photo in Tokyo’s Mori Museum — a group of what appeared to be a group of urban sophisticates wandering, seemingly lost, in a desert landscape. The image was part of an exhibit on the work of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, but it wasn’t the photo itself that was on display: Ai was the “curator”, working along with hip Swiss architects Herzog & deMeuron, of a project called “Ordos 100,” and the wanderers were among one hundred architects, each selected to develop a villa in a development near a booming city called Ordos in China’s resource-rich Inner Mongolia, which is apparently gaining a reputation as “the Chinese Texas”.
Since the onset of the global recession, Ordos has come to resemble its Texas counterparts in more ways than one: a vast, hypermodern extension of the city sits almost completely empty. Ordos cannot fill the hundreds of rank-and-file apartments that were conceived and constructed while Ordos 100’s vanity villas have remained in the design stage.
It was bad enough when they tore it down — now there’s the question of where to rebuild it. After the storm that swept through Hong Kong when the government tore down the Central Star Ferry pier in 2007, making way for a land reclamation project that is extending the waterfront by 300 metres, it was careful to avoid the same mistake when it removed the Queen’s Pier in 2008.
Instead of being knocked down, each piece of pier was carefully preserved and put into storage. Though it wasn’t particularly remarkable on its own, the pier was important as a symbol of British colonialism, being the place where British royals and Hong Kong governors landed when they arrived in Hong Kong. Together with City Hall and the Star Ferry pier, it formed part of a trinity of white Modernist structures that represented the straightforward ambition of postwar colonialism.
Now that the land reclamation project is well underway, the question is whether the Queen’s Pier should be rebuilt on the new waterfront, or in its previous location, on the shores of an artificial lagoon. The government is pressing for the former, which would allow the pier to continue functioning as a pier, but heritage activists insist on the latter. Yesterday, a group of them proposed that Edinburgh Place (the collective name for City Hall and its environs) be declared an historic monument, which would legally require the government to put the pier back where it originally stood.
When I saw this fun Berlin-commie-block-as-Tetris video, I immediately thought of Habitat 67, Moshe Safdie’s experimental modular apartment building. When it was built, by assembling prefab housing cubes into a jumbled whole, it looked more or less like what you see in this video. Unfortunately, Safdie’s vision of customizable, prefabricated apartment construction wasn’t as feasible as he had hoped, so instead of the deconstructionist cubes of Habitat 67, we have a world filled with lookalike boxes.
Below is an excerpt from Stuart Cooper’s 1977 movie The Disappearance, starring Donald Sutherland as a hitman who lives in Habitat 67. There’s plenty of great shots set to a very appropriate soundtrack.
The Midtown West intersection was windswept and deserted, save for two fighting children. To their right, a weed-strewn lot, some freshly-painted tags, a shopping cart filled with someone’s belongings from some far-off store called “Buy Buy Baby”, a long-unnecessary construction cone. To their left: an empty, suburban-style Mercedes dealership, out-of-place, surreal — just a little beyond was the Empire State Building. In the near background, a panorama of half-finished new condo towers, half-gleaming in once-trendy sheaths of glass.
New York has not reverted to the destitution claimed by some of the shriller portraits painted by the European press, which cover the economic downturn’s grip on the U.S. with the same sensationalism they once reported on the country’s urban crime. The recession is marked by subtler symbols — the increasing emptiness of storefronts, on the one hand, and the skeletal remains of stunted skyscrapers, on the other. New York’s condo tower boom is over, leaving behind a forest of halted cranes, a frozen Dubai.
Hong Kong’s prewar buildings number in the hundreds, yet the few of them that remain continue to be knocked down for mediocre new development. This photo compilation by Lee Chi-man is one of the clearest examples I’ve seen. Just a few years ago (the top photo appears to have been taken in 2003, during the SARS crisis), the northwest corner of Un Chau and Pei Ho streets in Sham Shui Po was occupied by a ramshackle but typically elegant example of early twentieth century Hong Kong architecture. Like many buildings built before World War II, it was in poor condition, but it stood its ground with remarkable grace. It had enormous potential for restoration.
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