Look Behind You

Naka-Meguro, Tokyo

Excavating the Present

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?”

More

Bring Your Own Chair

Good street furniture is not one of Hong Kong’s strengths, so when people here can’t find a place to sit outdoors, they do the most logical thing: they bring their own chair.

In natural gathering spots around the city you’ll come across a motley array of household chairs that have been placed outdoors and tied to a post or railing. You can see them at bench-less bus stops, or on steep stairways, sometimes with one leg trimmed so the chair can sit evenly on the steps. I’ve even come across chairs tied to trees in the woods that are never more than a 15 or 20 minute walk from any part of the city.

In the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, which runs until the end of February on a piece of vacant waterfront land, designers Rosly Mok and Vanessa Chan have created a public bench out of discarded chairs.

More

Drinking from the Big Nose

Drinking fountains are everywhere in Rome, quite useful in a city where temperatures hover above 35C in the summer. These cast-iron fountains are known affectionately as nasoni, or “big noses,” due to the Pinocchio-esque appearance of their spouts. The design dates back to 1872, when the first twenty fountains were installed. Today, there are over 2,000 in the city, most of them emblazoned with the ancient Roman motto SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus).

More

Street Flourishes

Hong Kong is a city with very utilitarian streetscapes — everything on the street, from paving to furniture, is standardized, cost-efficient and bland — so visiting Taipei was a bit of a relief. Streets there are far more haphazard and eclectic. Part of that has to do with the wide range of street furniture (like the bollards I wrote about last winter) but part of it simply comes from nice decorative touches, like these mosaic walls along Yongkang Street. They add a bit of individuality and character to the street, avoiding (at least in this part of Taipei) the repetitiveness so common here in HK.

Hong Kong Doorways: For Rent

Hong Kong is an entrepreneurial place. Even when a shop goes out of business, it isn’t out of the game: as soon as the shutter comes down, the broker signs go up. In most cities, a landlord might try to rent the space out himself, or hire to a single broker to do the job. Here, brokers compete for the space. Shuttered shops become symbolic battlefields on which brokers fight for a commission equivalent to a month’s rent — no small sum of money in a city where ground-floor shops go for thousands of dollars per square foot.

With retail on just about every street, many neighbourhoods have their fair share of vacant shops, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. On the next street over from my apartment, where this photo was taken, a restaurant found the sidewalk in front of an empty store the perfect place to set up a couple of tables and some stools.

Nice Bollards

Taipei is a surprising city. There’s a fine line between ugly haphazardness and charming idiosyncrasy; for the most part, the Taiwanese capital seems to land on the latter side. Its broad boulevards would be bland and overwhelming if it weren’t for the arcaded sidewalks filled with parked scooters. The rambling lanes that run between those boulevards are lined for the most part with architecturally uninspiring apartment buildings, but the abundance of potted plants, hidden café terraces and dilapidated wooden bungalows more than make up for that. In theory, Taipei has everything going against it, but it gets so many small things right that it’s actually a pretty remarkable place.

These bollards are just one example of what I mean. Many people have a love-hate relationship with bollards: on one hand, they’re often ugly and overzealously implemented, but on the other, they keep cars out of pedestrian space. (In any case, they’re a lot nicer than the hideous grey fences that Hong Kong uses to segregate pedestrian and vehicular traffic.) Only rarely do they exceed their immediate purpose, which is why I like the bollards just outside Ximen metro station, in which images of historical streetscenes are embedded. Over on busy Yongkang Street, meanwhile, chubby concrete bollards add to the street both a place to sit and something a bit more unexpected.

Mirrors

Mirrors on Yongkang Street, near Shida, Taipei

The Corner Phone Booth

Kristian Gravenor is building himself a reputation as Montreal’s foremost expert on phone booths. He explored their history in Montreal in a recent Gazette article, from the first wooden booths installed in hotel lobbies (“Each wooden telephone booth looked like a confessional, your very own downtown cabin — as they say in French — where you could blab all day for just a few cents”) and on city streets.

News of the phone booth’s decline has made it into just about every North American publication at some point or another, but Montreal, which has one of the lowest rates of mobile phone use in Canada, has been slow to shed many of its booths. You can still find a few near most major corners, despite mayor Jean Drapeau’s attempt in the 1970s to rid the city streets of payphones, along with newspaper boxes and mailboxes.

My own corner phone booth stands near Park and Bernard. Back before I had a cell phone, it was a convenient place from which to call when the power was out, or when I failed to pay the phone bill and Bell cut off my service. Ever since Bell raised payphone rates to 50 cents per call, though, there hasn’t been much point in using it. In fact, when I pass by, the only people who seem to use it come from the adjacent “massage” parlour, which is open until 4am daily and employs masseuses who seem to work only in bra and panties.

Montreal’s Lampposts

Montreal has a particularly varied collection of lampposts. They often seem to change from street to street, reflecting different eras with different design tastes. In Westmount, and on Esplanade Avenue facing Jeanne-Mance Park, vintage lampposts dating back to the 1920s or 30s still stand. Similarly old light standards, engraved with the city’s coat of arms, can be found in many downtown alleys. Elsewhere, lampposts range in style from coolly modern (like on Park Avenue) to gaudily faux-historic (like in Old Montreal). I’m kicking myself for not doing more to explore these different types of street lights before I left town, although some might consider that to be one step closer to doorknobs.

More

Brisez la vitre open door

Earlier this year, when I marvelled at Boston’s still-functioning system of public fire alarm boxes, Kate McDonnell pointed out that Montreal once had such a system, too. Unlike Boston, though, Montreal removed all of its boxes, but one still stands outside the firefighters’ museum at Laurier and St. Laurent. Naturally enough, it’s bilingual.

Angle

Mailboxes