Archive for the Interior Space category
September 1st, 2010
It feels a bit weird to admit this, but I actually prefer taking the bus over the MTR — Hong Kong’s clean, efficient metro system — because it keeps me sane. The bus might take twice as long, but at least I’m not shoved aside by people rushing into the trains at stops, or squished into a corner by the rush hour masses.
Every time I ride the MTR, I witness some kind of egregious behaviour that I wish I could punish with a slap across the face or a kick to the groin. I’m obviously not alone, because Mark Tjhung, an editor at the local edition of Time Out magazine, has fulfilled my daily dream: he became a subway vigilante. In a video that accompanies a column about rude behaviour on the MTR, Tjhung poses as an officer of the “MTR Police” and gives out tickets for infractions he sees while riding the trains (along with a yellow card, soccer-style, just for kicks).
Unfortunately, Tjhung is mistaken for a real MTR employee, and his first order of business is to deal with a pile of vomit somebody has left on the platform. The video is also somewhat disappointing — we get to vicariously chastise a kid who sits blithely in front of the hobbled old lady standing in front of him, and smirk as Tjhung gives a ticket to a teenager drinking bubble tea on the train, but we don’t have the satisfaction of seeing justice brought to the absolute worst human beings on the MTR: the door-rushers.
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August 28th, 2010
Tai Po Market Cooked Food Centre. Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan
The decor consists of handwritten menus and beer posters taped to the wall, the lighting is a harsh fluorescent glare and there’s a constant din from the kitchen. No matter: it’s Saturday night and the Bowrington Road Cooked Food Centre is packed.
At one table, a family shares a steamed fish and a bottle of wine. At another, a group of middle-aged men down large bottles of beer while playing a noisy game of dice. When one of the players notices some other diners observing the game, he holds up his beer and offers them a toast.
Tucked inside the top floors of neighbourhood wet markets, invisible from the street, Hong Kong’s cooked food centres are an odd cross between a shopping mall food court and a streetside dai pai dong. And despite their clinical-sounding names, many of them have become destinations for hearty, boisterous and affordable meals.
“Going to a cooked food centre is about the whole experience,” says Jason BonVivant, a food critic who writes for several local publications, as well as the food website OpenRice. (He insisted on being keeping his identity concealed to preserve his anonymity as a critic.) Though it’s “loud, not particularly clean and a bit uncomfortable,” the attraction is the combination of good food and a lively, informal atmosphere, he says.
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August 23rd, 2010
Tucked away next to the slopes of the Colina de Mong-Há, halfway between the dog-racing track and the Red Market, the Ox Warehouse doesn’t call much attention to itself. But inside the slightly ramshackle quarters of this former cattle depot is one of the avant-garde spaces that are nurturing the arts in Macau.
Frank Lei Loi-fan has run the space since it opened in 2003. “At the time there wasn’t much going on,” he says. Few organizations existed to support Macau artists and not many artists were working full-time, especially not in the realm of contemporary art. So the Ox Warehouse began organizing exchanges between Macau and overseas artists. “Before, the Portuguese just had official galleries in the centre of town that showed artists who weren’t local,” he says. “Now we see that young people want to organize their own activities, ones that are closer to our local culture in Macau. Macau has a lot of people who like to take photos or to draw, but they needed to branch out and learn to absorb knowledge and experience from others.”
Macau’s art scene has always been fluid, with many artists coming from Portugal and other European countries, while local Chinese artists leave Macau to study overseas or on the mainland. After studying journalism, Lei moved to France, where he studied film and photography. When he returned, he first resisted joining an arts organization. “There’s too many cultural associations in Macau and they exist only to ask for money,” he says. But he realized that, without something to support local talent, Macau’s art scene would never develop.
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August 9th, 2010
Capital Café, part of a new generation of bing sutts in Hong Kong
It looks like any other Starbucks — until you gaze past the espresso machine and notice a scene straight out of a vintage Hong Kong movie. Handwritten menus are taped to the walls, birdcages hang from the ceiling and green-framed windows open onto a landscape of big-character signs.
In a nod to Hong Kong’s original cafe culture, the Duddell Street Starbucks in Central has recreated a vintage bing sutt, an informal kind of restaurant popular in the postwar years that serves eggs, sandwiches, pasta soups and iced drinks, although the Starbucks bing sutt limits itself to coffee-flavored pineapple buns, egg tarts and Swiss rolls.
“We wanted to come up with something unique that could represent Hong Kong’s past,” says Teresa Shum, Starbucks’ public relations manager. “Bing sutts in the past served the same purpose as Starbucks. It was a place for people to connect to each other, to family and friends.”
In the 1950s, 60s and 70s, bing sutts were found throughout Hong Kong, but they have since become a rarity, with no more than a few dozen left in the entire city. Now they seem poised for a comeback. Over the past year, several new bing sutts have opened on Hong Kong Island, drawing interest from a young generation smitten by the romance of nostalgia and fascinated by Hong Kong’s heritage.
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August 8th, 2010
Woman reading a hand-written letter in the Navarino bakery-café.
Mile End, Montreal, September 25, 2004
July 9th, 2010
The Rialto Theatre is located on the corner of rue Bernard and avenue du Parc, in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood. It was built in 1924 and was one of thousands of ornate movie theatres built in North America at the turn of the century, at a time when films were first entering the mainstream.
These theatres were called movie palaces — a fitting title as they were defined by an over-the-top ornamental aesthetic that evoked old world grandeur. Think limestone balustrades, wrought iron railings, gold molding and red velvet curtains. Most of the movie palaces in the 1920s were built to pay homage to architectural monuments in Europe. The Rialto itself was styled after the Paris Opera House by Montreal architect Joseph Raoul Gariepy. It has been designated as a heritage site by all three levels of government and is considered by its residents to be as much a part of the fabric of Mile End as its bagel shops, cafes and madcap personalities.
The Rialto has stood mostly vacant for the past few years, while its owner, Elias Kalogeras, looked for buyers. Kalogeras had owned the theatre since 1983. During this time it underwent a number of transformations. He purchased the Rialto with hopes of turning it into a mini-Eaton Centre, but the Ministry of Culture intervened and his plans never materialized. Since then it has been a nightclub, a concert venue, a repertory theatre, and a steakhouse. Kalogeras was confronted with many of the problems owners of defunct movie palaces faced: the difficulty of successfully filling such a cavernous space while maintaining the charm of a historic building and keeping it updated to the needs of contemporary society.
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July 2nd, 2010
Above, 1980s. Below, 2010. Compilation by Lee Chi-man
The fact that a row of prewar shophouses still stands on Johnston Road suggests we’ve entered a new chapter in Hong Kong’s history of urban development. Originally housing the century-old Woo Cheong Pawn Shop and other neighbourhood businesses, the shophouses were bought by the Urban Renewal Authority and incorporated into a property development that included the construction of a luxury apartment tower.
Now the buildings contain a high-end restaurant and café known as The Pawn, which takes its name from the Woo Cheong Pawn Shop, one of the building’s former tenants. Designed by Stanley Wong, its interior is a British colonial mash-up, with a menu to match (think English ale and fried pig’s ears).
Over the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of people about things related to heritage, and The Pawn keeps cropping up as an example of how buildings shouldn’t be preserved. It’s historic preservation for the highest bidder — the shell of an old building maintained and converted into something with the veneer of history. The ultimate irony is that the Woo Cheong Pawn Shop is still around; it was forced to move down the street to make way for The Pawn.
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June 24th, 2010
Roppongi
Tokyo defines concrete jungle: over 2,000 square kilometers of closely-packed, largely monochrome buildings set amid a tangle of clogged, winding roads, elevated highways, rail lines, and telephone wires. For many who are lost amid the ceaseless forward march of its sidewalks and churning perambulations in the corridors of its vast train stations, cafes perched several stories above the street — often, to further their escapist appeal, sporting French or Italian themes — offer rare opportunities to step back from the city’s omnipresent crowds and inexorable movement.
As much as they are respites from urban intensity, these perches also provide the best means to gain some perspective on the unwieldy metropolis. Their patrons may appear trapped in tiny windows when viewed from the street below, but they offer a scattered audience cheap, upper-balcony tickets to the spectacle of the city — itself snarled, not just in traffic, but anxiety and routine.
Shinjuku
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June 14th, 2010
In April, I wrote about the Cheungs, who live in a condemned building in Kwun Tong. Years ago, they built shacks on their roofs and cage homes in their flat to rent to poor tenants. This photo was taken in the flat, which is still home to a few elderly people who live in the cages, which are really just metal bunk beds with mesh gates to protect against theft. The apartment is filthy and filled with decades of accumulated junk. At least the wraparound windows are nice.
June 8th, 2010
Street food outside 7-Eleven, Phetchaburi, Bangkok
Dépanneurs — the Montreal convenience stores that are a favourite topic of mine — are big in the news lately with the publication of a new book by Judith Lussier, Sacré dépanneur! The latest contribution to the spate of media coverage is a profile by Montreal Gazette reporter Jeff Heinrich of Joe Zhou, who owns a dep on the Plateau’s Duluth Street.
Clocking in at 2,600 words, Heinrich’s piece is the longest newspaper feature on deps I’ve ever read, and he puts the length to great effect with detailed descriptions of Zhou and his clientele. Zhou is a former electrical engineer from China who obtained a second engineering degree in Montreal, only to find himself shut out of the job market because he had no Canadian work experience. (It’s surely a common story among dep owners, many of whom left comfortable middle-class lives in China, only to work 60 hours a week running a shop in Montreal.) To get by, he ended up going into the convenience store business with a Chinese acquaintance.
Zhou’s dep is a crossroads for the entire neighbourhood. It’s the kind of romantic general store that has died out in many parts of the world. “In Quebec, a dépanneur is a kind of community,” he tells Heinrich. “People are friends here. They know you, they talk to you like you’re a member of the family. They tell you about their daughter, their son, their neighbours, their neighbourhood — you always learn something. We communicate. Around here, I know everybody. When my customers come here, I know what they want.”
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February 18th, 2010
Photographed a couple years ago while en route to Calgary from Pearson International Airport in Toronto. I love how the pilot’s silhouette is so well defined and yet the idea of multiple existences in time and space is very much alive. If you’re viewing with a calibrated display you’ll enjoy subtleties like aqua pastel tones.
January 23rd, 2010
DCORBEIL | Plaisir incandescent, 2009
« Fin d’après-midi de juillet. Soleil qui glisse lentement vers le nord-ouest – typiquement montréalais – que je regarde par la large porte qui s’ouvre sur la terrasse.
J’y trouve une amie, française de passage à Montréal, brûlant cigarettes sur cigarettes en étirant de longues conversations oisives à son amoureux sis en mère patrie.
J’étire le cou d’un centimètre supplémentaire : le ciel est mou. Vaste toile orangée qui découpe les clochers du Mile End.
Je retourne à la cuisine.
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January 19th, 2010
DCORBEIL | Un caffè et un rêve, 2009
« En chemin, la pluie reprend vigueur et me rattrape rue Saint-Viateur. Je plonge, tête première, au Olimpico. La terrasse, partiellement à l’abri de notre climat capricieux, est déjà bondée par une foule bigarrée de fumeurs, accrocs du caffè, de Bobos, de m’as-tu-vus et autres lesbiennes dépravées. Aussi quelques habitués : le fou du village, le boulanger du coin. Une petite fille seule, l’air débile. Et moi, un peu à l’écart, un peu inclus dans le groupe.
Caffè macchiato, que je commande dans un italien trop confiant. On me sert, et je demande un verre d’eau, pour authentifier mon origine catanaise. Je donne un pourboire généreux, nonchalamment, tout en jetant un regard rassuré sur la mine heureuse du barrista. Les affaires sont les affaires, et je ne suis pas un cheap. De toute façon, je calcule qu’on me sert ici un café parmi les meilleurs en ville, pour un prix dérisoire. J’investis donc dans le service, même si ce dernier est toujours un peu laborieux. Et pas très volontaire.
M’installant sur une des tables qui longent la large fenestration, je constate que je suis bien seul ici. Même le fou du village se retrouve au centre d’une petite bande d’hurluberlus. Il reçoit un appel, ça semble important. Peut-être brasse-t-il des affaires. Des trucs louches. La drogue ? je m’interroge. Je penche davantage pour la porno, avec son air de pervers, ses culottes noires et délavées. Son veston vieillot, trop petit pour son ventre protubérant. Sa tête échevelée. Son regard perdu. Il est grotesque et se couvre de ridicule. Malgré tout, le barrista l’interpelle comme on le ferait un ami. Malgré sa mine bête, il fait partie de la place.
Alors que moi je suis seul. Un imposteur, une imposture. Un voyeur même. Un autre type de perversion.
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January 13th, 2010
An indoor camper in Williamsburg. Photo by Johnny DeKam and Bree Edwards.
Having successively appropriated so much Middle American iconography — from trucker hats to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer — some north Brooklyn hipsters may have decided that their living space ought to reach the same heights of irony as their wardrobes. Enter the Nut Factory (video below), an exclusive trailer park for artists currently situated inside a warehouse in Bushwick, east of Williamsburg.
Like homesteaders following the route of the transcontinental railroad, hipsters began gentrifying parts of Bushwick along the L train when — depending on whom you ask — they were priced out of Williamsburg or began to find it too mainstream for their liking. So while the “frontier” of their settlement has technically pushed out as far as Ridgewood, in Queens, it’s concentrated mainly along the narrow corridor easily reached by the L, and vast swathes of industrial Bushwick still invite experiments in cheap housing.
Among them, the urban trailer park may be uniquely qualified to come of age.
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