Archive for the Interior Space category
January 18th, 2011
Hong Kong’s gloomy winter chill has set in, and with no indoor heating, the best thing to do on a cold day is to set off for a brisk walk. That’s what I did two weeks ago when I took the train up to Fanling, the last major suburb before the border with Shenzhen, where I wandered over to the market town of Luen Wo Hui.
Though it seems old in comparison to what surrounds it, Luen Wo was actually a modern development master-minded by a group of wealthy Fanling property owners in the 1940s. A market was built in 1951 to serve the surrounding farms and villages. Over the course of the 1950s, the surrounding area was developed with shophouses into a regional commercial centre meant to compete with the nearby market town of Shek Wu Hui, about 20 minutes away by foot.
(The story behind Luen Wo’s development is actually quite fascinating, with inter-family rivalries, accusations of price-gouging, rural politics and the influx of Chinese refugees after 1949, many of whom were farmers from around Guangzhou and who resumed their agricultural practices in Hong Kong. It’s all covered in sociologist Chan Kwok-shing’s essay on Luen Wo Hui.)
Luen Wo quickly became economic and political centre for the surrounding area. There were rice shops, dry goods stores, travel agents, barbershops and a cinema, as well as bars that served British troops stationed in nearby military bases. In the 1980s, Fanling was designated as a New Town — a focal point for new population growth — and intense development followed.
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January 8th, 2011
Earlier this week, the urban issues magazine Next American City tweeted a link to an illustrated cross-section of the Kowloon Walled City, the world’s greatest informal settlement. It gives you a good idea of just how intense the level of human activity within the city was: one room a factory, the next a bedroom, the next a restaurant, all of it linked by an unplanned panoply of staircases, bridges and alleyways.
It has been nearly 18 years since the last piece of the Walled City was torn down by the Hong Kong government. Interest in the city has only magnified since then; there are books, documentaries, websites and discussion forum threads about its architecture, how it came to be and what it was like living inside. (This forum thread in particular is worth looking at — with 330 posts since 2004, it’s as complete a repository of information as you’ll find online.)
By the time it met its demise, the Walled City was an interconnected group of buildings, some up to 16 stories in height, that was home to 33,000 people. It covered an area of just 6.5 acres, making it the most densely-populated place on earth. Long notorious for its brothels and drug dens, it was also home to unlicenced dental clinics, small factories, restaurants and hundreds of ordinary working-class families, most of them recent migrants from mainland China. The entire city was built by hand, without a master plan: a shantytown in highrise form.
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December 9th, 2010
Villa Besnus in 1922 and 2010.
Photo compilation by Laurent David Ruamps
In 1922, Le Corbusier was hired by a man named George Besnus to build a new house in the Paris suburb of Vaucresson. It was the architect’s first chance to put the Purist ideals he had been toying with to practice: an architecture stripped of its excesses, made as clean, clear and efficient as possible. The house was meant as a statement, from the gracefully rounded edges of its balcony to the bathroom, which was placed in the centre of the building, allowing for an uninterrupted flow of interior space.
As you can see in the photo compilation above, though, Le Corbusier’s original design has been altered beyond recognition. Gone are the carefully-considered proportions, the clean contrast with scrubby surroundings. A four-sided roof replaced the original flat one and shops were built in the house’s front garden. It now looks like a slightly more modern version of the petit bourgeois houses that surround it, which is ironic, considering that Le Corbusier’s Modernist villa predates them by at least several years. In a way, knowing that those fuddy-duddy traditional houses were built during the emergence of Modernism makes you all the more sympathetic to Le Corbusier’s ideals. You can see very clearly what he was working against.
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December 6th, 2010
The Internet meets the MTR: trying on a jacket bought online.
Photos by Oliver Tsang for the South China Morning Post
Nobody seemed alarmed by the sight of two 17-year-old boys playing with guns in the Hong Kong MTR. It was early Wednesday evening at Prince Edward Station and Kelvin Cheung was inspecting a pistol he had arranged to buy from Simon Lee.
“It’s for war games,” Cheung explained as he pulled the trigger on an empty semi-automatic air-powered handgun. He has been playing war games for six months, he said, and he found Lee on Uwants, an online marketplace. After confirming the sale online, they arranged to meet at Prince Edward to finish the transaction. Cheung paid HK$300 for the gun, which he said would have cost HK$570 in a retail store.
“This is my first time buying from Simon, but I actually have two other purchases I’m going to pick up in the station tonight,” said Cheung.
As the rush hour crowds thickened, about fifty other people milled around the edges of the station’s fare-paid zone, most of them waiting to pick up goods they had ordered online. Cash changed hands; so did makeup kits, concert tickets, cameras and bags full of clothing.
In most parts of the world, online shopping is a straightforward process: find what you want, enter your credit card information and have it shipped to your home. Not so in Hong Kong, where analysts describe the online retail market as “underdeveloped” and consumers have long been sceptical of buying things online.
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November 14th, 2010
“Caffe latte, please !”, Caffe Della Via, Villeray, Montreal
Un matin à l’aurore, j’étire mes jambes jusqu’au bus 80 Nord, en direction de la bonne vieille gare Jean-Talon, frontière industrielle – le Mile-Ex comme certains le surnomment désormais – où se termine allègrement la longue Avenue du Parc. Nous sommes en novembre et déjà, les feuilles trainent au long des rues, amassées en amas aux pieds de ces arbres dès lors nus et ballotés par un vent frais.
Intensité glaciale.
La lumière timide du soleil traverse par l’oblique cette brume si commune à l’approche de l’hivers. J’ai un frisson qui me parcourt le corps, des pieds à la tête et qui se finit par me faire tressaillir maladroitement au débarcadère de la station.
Des métros Parc à Castelneau, deux courtes minutes qui me propulsent à la frontière Nord de la Petite Italie, et puis je poursuis mon chemin vers l’Est. La rue Castelneau forme un bel ensemble de plex en briques rouges ou brunes, avec au rez-de-chaussée quelques commerces agréables – affichant parfois des noms aux sonorités maghrébines – et à l’offre hétéroclite. Quelques pas de plus, et puis une imposante église, au coeur de ce qui semble être un de ces milliers de petits villages-quartiers qui forment un Montréal cohérent et diversifié.
Face au balourd monument néoclassique, ce café.
Étroite vitrine à l’angle de la rue Henri-Julien, lumières tamisées en ce levé de soleil. Promesse d’intimité.
L’enseigne réclame le Caffe della Via. Trois mots qui parlent des évidences: ce lieu est définitivement le café du quartier.
8h37: une foule se bagarre au comptoir, afin de réclamer un de ces déjà si bien réputés espresso.
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November 10th, 2010
The contrast on both sides of the street is only as jarring as you make it out to be, if you notice it at all.
You can see it while standing in the middle of Sinan Lu (思南路), facing Fuxing West Lu (复兴西路) in Shanghai’s French Concession. A noted commercial development of ostentatious luxury sits face to face with the ghosts of past riches. Both Shanghai past and Shanghai present are embodied in the traditional, old, European-style villas. But those on one side of the street have had their layouts redesigned, their foundations tilted sideways, their innards replaced with modern amenities (lifts!), and their courtyards beautified with plenty of commercial landscaping. On the other side of the street stand facsimiles of the original, unmodified versions of these structures: tired, broken down and devoid of occupants.
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October 19th, 2010
Hubertys Bräu, Josefstadt, Vienna
Vienna, Austria: Here, cafés are a part of a culture that respects small moments shared with the city. No one will rush you, since you are a guest, and then they will serve you as long as you wish, even if unwanted, while you discuss and read the news, as they used to do a century ago — or while you blog on your Mac, as we do today.
Innere Stadt
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October 17th, 2010
Laundry in an old basement, Jena (2010)
October 5th, 2010
Johnston Road, Wan Chai. Photo compilation by Lee Chi-man
When Philip Kenny wanders around Hong Kong, taking photos for his blog on local heritage, one type of building always catches his interest: Chinese shophouses. “They are a reminder of what Hong Kong used to be like — a bit old and rickety, perhaps, but vastly more colourful,” he says.
Kenny knows, however, that many of the shophouses he stumbles across could soon disappear. “I mourn the fact that pre-war buildings that have survived many years of Hong Kong’s harsh climate, as well as street fighting and bombing raids during the war, end up being torn down on the whim of a developer,” he says.
Step back in time to the 1950s and shophouses, with their stone façades and distinctive balconies and verandahs, would have been found on nearly every major street in town, from Yuen Long in the north all the way down to Aberdeen in the south. Today, all but a handful have disappeared, scattered like ashes from a fire. Recognizing the threat to Hong Kong’s heritage, nearly 100 shophouses are now being restored by the government and the Urban Renewal Authority (URA), but many more have been left untouched, their chances of survival growing increasingly slim.
“They are extremely vulnerable,” says Lee Ho-yin, the director of the University of Hong Kong’s architectural conservation program. For every shophouse that is saved, like the famous Blue House in Wan Chai, dozens more are razed for development. “There was a beautiful row of shophouses [in Tai Hang] that was torn down two years ago without anyone noticing, and they were a lot more architecturally significant than the Blue House,” he says.
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October 3rd, 2010
It was just one night but it seems most people in Hong Kong could not go without air conditioning. Last Wednesday, about 50,000 households switched off their air-con units for Hong Kong’s first No Air Con Night, an event organized by the eco-group Green Sense to raise awareness of the environmental impact of air conditioning.
But for the remaining 2,285,000 homes in the city, it was business as usual.
“I tried to sleep without the A/C on, but it was too noisy to keep the windows open and the room heated up so fast,” one Mongkok resident said.
In just a few decades, Hong Kong has evolved into an air-con dependent city, with most people spending their days in housing estates, shopping malls and office towers that become furnaces without the cooling systems. The dependence continues at night as temperatures soar in our high-rise, heat island homes. So much so that air con accounts for 60 per cent of the city’s power consumption in summer.
When it comes to air conditioning, we seem to have built ourselves into a corner. Now, some are looking for a way out.
“Even in the 1990s, schools were not air conditioned, many buses had no air con and there were not as many shopping malls,” said Gabrielle Ho, the project manager of Green Sense. “Now the first thing people do when they get home is switch on the air con. Everywhere is so air-conditioned, people have gotten used to it.”
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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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