Evidently in Hong Kong, remaining buildable land = 0.
Large scale projects were not built in Hong Kong, but on land strips and islands the former colony has learnt to colonize. Ironically, some of these "colonies" came at the cost of slicing up the city's own flesh. The fragments that appear as an intact city, are held together only by a delusion blurred amidst soaring skyscrapers and extensive infrastructure, where the city itself is nowhere to be seen.
In the size of a city, the ambition of a 7-million population parallels a country. This airport island could have existed between any two speckles in the South China Sea. In fact, in the very near future, I propose the Empire of Hong Kong.
On a calm day, an average white-collar glides through the city. Glancing through the streetscape, the city operates just as he imagines. He meets a colleague, they exchange hallucinations. The storm arrives. The clustered ever more dense, the dispersed ever more open. Glass shatters, trees topple, but for once, they are real. 2010 is 1910. The global city, might as well, a barren rock.
This is a study of space through shifts in urban conditions brought about by extreme weather conditions. While the general user is often oblivious to his occupation of space, adverse weathers heighten the sense of surroundings and the existence (or non-existence) of the self. Space becomes sensitive and urbanization intensified as activity pattern tends to the extremes of either refuge or engagement of the storm. These shifts in urban behaviors would unveil latent spaces usually undetected in mild weathers, or instantly forgotten after the storm. The simultaneous change in density and degrees of activation would perhaps generate a more accurate image on the resiliency of the city, and help understand the effect of weather on urbanization.
The chosen site is Hong Kong, whose urbanization originated along the Victoria Harbor, but encounters 5-6 tropical cyclones annually. The preliminary scope of research includes documentations of typhoons in Hong Kong since late 19th century, typhoon-related constructions and their emerged culture throughout the century, and modes of preparation and recovery within the city. Critical questions include the identification of the existing weather-sensitive infrastructure, and exploration into the movement of typhoon, the distortion of time, and the change in perception of the city.
The mode of representation deployed should demonstrate the uncertain nature of extreme weathers and the shifts in urban scale. Other than the annual destructions, also the excitement and embracement of storm in people residing in the region.
Paradigm map showing the converging of disciplines in recent projects, disciplines are readjusted and redefined. Can architecture and meteorology expand even further?
Time Migration - The site mapped below is the course of Typhoon Fengshen in 12 hours, overlaid with measures of air pressure and wind directions recorded in the 20 observatories in Hong Kong. Most weather documentations are time-based, but can time be weather-based? User Migration - mapped below is the east portion of Victoria Harbor, centered by the Yau Ma Tei Typhoon Shelter. Movement of boats contracts to carved out shelters along the waterfront. Movement of people diverge to the most dense and the most open.
Site Migration. Site is the shift in site, the simultaneous activation and de-activation of spaces. Degree of storm-sensitivity causes effect on neighboring areas.
2009 Typhoon Molave (signal no.9, 15 July, 2009 14 HKT to 19 July, 2009 08 HKT) - News report at Tsim Sha Tsui Ferry Pier. Typhoon is all about the fun except when reported on news.
2009 Typhoon Koppu - (signal no. 8，13 September, 2009 08 HKT to 15 September, 2009 08 HKT) Video taken by extreme storm chase, James Reynolds, at Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront.
2008 Typhoon Nuri (signal no.9, 17 August, 2008 08 HKT to 23 August, 2008 02 HKT) News report clips of more activities at the waterfront, including typhoon surfing at the beach.
1972 The most severe flooding event in Hong Kong leading to landslides and collapsed buildings.
1962 Typhoon Wanda (signal no.10, 30 August, 1962 20 HKT to 02 September, 1962 01 HKT) Record-breaking typhoon in severity and damage done to the city. Reason due to its track across Hong Kong on the south, the city was on its windy right side for a prolonged period of time. The video also show the hoisting of typhoon signals, not figuratively but physically, at the signal stations. There were 24 signal stations on islands and along waterfront of Hong Kong that signaled to mariners both in Victoria Harbour and South China Sea. The practice was only recently decommissioned in 2002.
1960 Victoria Harbour in comparison to today's skyline. The buildings hide the landscape, but the storm hides them all. Victoria Harbour is the dividing water between Hong Kong Island on its south and Kowloon on its north. All of these clips are facing the Hong Kong side of the harbour, where the earliest British settlement was, and so as the current skyline of the city. The difficult hilly terrain was once the dominant feature of the island (and partially the reason it was chosen as the concession to the Great Britain), but it did not stop skyscrapers from anchoring upon it. But what happens when these skyscrapers are in direct interface with the wind and the rain? If only they can retreat back to the landscape, or simply disappear.
1953 Typhoon Susan
...Future?
2008 Super Typhoon Viper - fictitious super typhoon filmed by the Discovery Channel series named the "Perfect Disaster". It provides a good introduction to the formation of typhoon in the Northwest Pacific and the possibility of a super typhoon in the near future, and how Hong Kong is especially prone to its devastation due to its geological conditions. The over-dramatization of the storm was almost less than convincing, but it mentioned several precautionary measures currently undertaking in the city, including - one of the strictest building codes in the world, underground water tanks that hold 100,000 cubic meter of rainwater, concrete-covered slopes to prevent landslides.
The film expressed a certain optimism in the current weather technology, but here's another perspective:
"The fact is that a high level of 'sensitivity' to climate has persisted throughout the twentieth century and into our own time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was believed that technological progress would ultimately succeed in freeing man completely from the influence of nature. Towns in particular, 'artificial' spaces detached from the environment, were seen as offering their inhabitants protection from the hazards of the weather (whereas traditional rural societies, working to the rhythm of the season, were exposed to them)."
Counterintuitive to the contemporary mindset, perhaps the author is right in pointing out the delicacy of an urban city. The more bracings we add onto skyscrapers, the closer we situate the defenseless modern man in direct encounter with the storm. Being in the open habourfront is in no comparable risk than being in an high rise apartment with a broken window, or a midlevel condominium staged in a possible landslide.
"In fact, a double-edged process was under way: man was becoming both more powerful and more dependent. Population growth and density, especially in already overcrowded urban centres, creates new dependences sometimes more exacting than those experienced by traditional societies. Moreover, the risk of natural and technological disasters has intensified; think of the real or potential threats posed by earthquakes, nuclear accidents, floods, etc...The vagaries of the weather expose the fragility of transport systems and other infrastructure. Heavy rain, snow and cold spells are always likely to produce disasters, or at least disruption In some respects, the pre=industrial world enjoyed a greater degree of security: needs were less and the range of problems more limited. There was no risk of power cuts, failed heating systems or traffic jams." Lucian Boia, The Weather in the Imagination, p.96-97
The contemporary notion of travelling is inseparable from transportation vehicles and digital recorders like cameras. The panoramic and all-encompassing are mandatory selling points. Vehicles speed through aerials, moving frames and single-point perspectives, while cameras instantly flash on nearest surfaces in accordance. The act of occupancy necessarily mean passive capturing in replacement of active engagement.
Yet, such "realistic" measurements render only a highly biased selection of existence. These technological extensions of our body prove only limited and retreat back to brain activities to complete the reconstruction. Surfing on the surface of a city, the recorder picks up sufficient cues to convince himself of a civilization in real existence beyond his visions. To the viewer, a photograph presents not a captured moment, but an atmosphere opened up for an imagined generalization. Not only the selection images, but the order of presentation may also greatly affect the impression of a space, such as people, density, weather conditions. The city is a result of collective hallucination of mistaken spaces.
The ambivalence in our engagement within the urban condition is analogous to our ambivalence towards the environment, reluctance in full utilization or total surrender. But extreme weather conditions propel a decision and intensify urbanization. In occurrence of extreme weathers, like typhoon in Hong Kong, activity pattern is removed from the surface and urban conditions are exaggerated and pushed to the extremes. The population retract from open air and open water, condense into points and form edge conditions.
Movement in response to extreme weathers is not simply a distinction between outdoor and indoor, but refuge in the underground system and confrontation with the storm at the waterfront. The interest therefore lies in the possibility of investigating storm-sensitive spaces and housing storm activities.
- take for granted or as a given; suppose beforehand
- require as a necessary antecedent or precondition
+ "'airing' instead of the 'clearing' As she puts it: 'It is not light that creates the clearing, but light comes about only in virtue of the transparent levity of air. Light presupposes air.'" (p93)
TURBULENCE
- unstable flow of a liquid or gas
- instability in the atmosphere - a state of violent disturbance and disorder (as in politics or social conditions generally)
+ "What is turbulence then? It is a mess of disorder at all scales, small eddies within large ones. It is unstable. It is highly dissipative, meaning that turbulence drains energy and creates drag. it is motion turned random. But how does flow change from smooth to turbulent?" (S, M, L, XL, O.M.A., Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau, p1268)
- a short moral story (often with animal characters) - a visible symbol representing an abstract idea - an expressive style that uses fictional characters and events to describe some subject by suggestive resemblances; an extended metaphor .
+ "Allegories are not what we need now." (Manuel Gausa, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)
+ "The allegory seeks...to recover that which tends to die out. And the allegory acquires greater presence when a culture feels threatened, when a civilization is transformed and when certain historical forms fade. The allegory expresses the lament - the nostalgia - for this loss and has come to produce a whole series of aesthetic strategies which slow that loss or which, at the very least, maintain alive and present in another form that which, or the image of that which, is being lost." (DELCAN, Juan, "Arquitectura en la era de la electronica, "BAU016, 1997.)
Published in 1966, "The Hidden Dimension" is one of the very few attempts in documenting psychological effects in correlations with our environment. The concept of PROXEMICS is introduced by the author to mean "interrelated observations and theories of man's use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture". While measurements of space often only means limitation of site and regulation by default, the author argued for a strong case that the effect social distances have on us is rooted in our biological past, and can be precisely measured into centimeters. Subject to a much greater degree of variation, however, is man's perception of space; which is filtered by our (cultural conditioned) senses, language, and even personality development.
"When approached too closely, these schizophrenics panic in much the same way as ananimal recently lockedup in a zoo. In describing their feelings, such patients refer toanything that happens within their "flight distance" as taking place literally insidethemselves. That is, the boundaries of the self extend beyond the body. Theseexperiencesrecorded by therapists working with schizophrenics indicate that the realization of the self as we know it is intimately associated with the process of making boundaries explicit." (p12)
Prolonged social intrusion beyond these defined distances (most likely due to overpopulation) would unleash biochemical defense mechanism, or simply put, crowding induces stress. Not only psychological distress but a BEHAVIORAL SINK results in observation of "gross distortions of behavior...(as) the outcome of any behavioral process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers." Such observations necessarily suggests city today as a collective sink, that perhaps deviant behaviors, suicides and crimes, roots in the idea of urbanization itself.
To complicate the matter further, perception of density, and space in general, is not objective, but subject to the alternation of kinesthetic experience:
"As he moves through space, man depends on the messages received from his body tostabilize his visualworld. Without such body feedback, a great many people lose contactwith reality and hallucinate. The importance of being able to integrate visual and kinestheticexperience has been demonstrated by twopsychologists, Held and Heim, when they carriedkittens through a maze along the same track on which otherkittens were allowed to walk. The kittens that were carried failed to develop 'normal visual spatial capacities.'" (p66)
Living in the society of automobiles, sounds like we are born handicapped in visual-spatial capacities, and the "city" exists only in our hallucination.
The detrimental problem resides not in the pace of development, but its prioritizing of a distorted image that projects only directly outward. This results in architectural designs of disparate facades and its spatial interior, urban designs of segregated classifications causing further exclusion of the old city in current development.
Qianmen Street is an exemplary of the contemporary Chinese mentality in its desperate search external display of identity. The practice of counterfeit architecture not only targets at western architecture that symbolizes capitalism and technology, nor their own traditional representatives, but the double projection of our own imagination of Chinese glamour in the foreigner’s mind.
The value of Qianmen Street is solely dependent on the re-creation of its historical façade. As the above image suggests, even at the spot, some still chose to have their pictures taken in front of the Qianmen image printed on the construction partition, rather than the actual street. The functionality of Qianmen is perhaps no more than a same-size billboard, an undermined physical experience that is no different from the presentation of a rendered image. In the era of internet and information overflow, the mind only reacts to flashy images and the physical being is put into question. Archtiecturally speaking, the necessity of space is becoming less definite as technology surpasses physical distance. Skyscrapers will become excessive as people move work to home, as online shopping replaces malls, and renderings suggest reality. Do we accept space as replaceable, program interexchangeable?
+ "Classical orthopaedics (in fact, like architecture in the traditional city) tends to reproduce - to evoke or recreate - the absent element; to regenerate damaged fabric or to extend its old characteristics. There was something of a redemptive, and at once reconstructive, formalism about it. Dissimulating distortions. Composing appearances. Recovering the past. ...architecture cannot limit itself to simply extending the body, or sustaining it, but rather it must be simultaneously a receptive and active supplement; a device which is singular (autonomous and artificial) and complicit (individual and interactive); estranged from, and at the same time sensitive to, the particular; capable of regulating itself and, at the same time, of resturcutirng, restimulating and strenthening the host in order to take it beyond its own limits: revealing that whcih was hidden. Architecture must work as an "antitype" which is in syntony with the host body so as not to provoke rejection, yet no longer in harmonious symbiosis with it." (Manuel Gausa, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)
EXPENDABLE
- (of an object) Designed to be used only once and then abandoned or destroyed - of little significance when compared to an overall purpose, and therefore able to be abandoned
IMAGE
- a physical likeness or representation of a person, animal, or thing - a mental representation; idea; concept - the general or public perception - to project on a surface
It is false to say the Olympics is all about the physical; in Beijing, it is all about the visual. Million-dollar decisions happen within split seconds of an image appeal. There is the common goal for instantaneous excitement, the dropped-out eyes on foreign faces, the wow-effect. The Olympics and the fast-paced development it brought about has led to ever more concerns that the Old Beijing is dying, thousand years of culture disappearing in thin air. Present discontent followed by nostalgia is common, but at the same time, questionable that the latter would be of remedy.
Take Qianmen Dajie ("front" "door" "street", in literal translation) in Beijing for instance, the re-creation of its historical facade has only attracted more criticism despite it being the discussed outcome of 30 experts in history, architecture and urban planning. Located along the central axis, south of Tian'anmen Square, this major avenue leads directly into one of the nine historical city gates. Once the most critical commecial district in the capital, all travellers arriving from the south would have passed by its storefronts, been to its theatres. Even emperors paraded through Qianmen to arrive at the Temple of Heaven in the south to pray for the country. The arrival of foreigners in the early 20th century only brought in more trades in the area, until the 1980's when Qianmen finally became obsolete and disassociated from the rest of the city development.
Amid controversies, the Olympics has restored its historical façade of the 1920’s, but along came a new identity – to relive the Old Beijing, and present to the world traditional Chinese culture. The by-product being that the street is no longer a street. Both north and south ends are fenced off to only allow underground crossing. Stores are spacious but lack occupants. The general wonder follows that the new identity of Qianmen is in no relations to its spatial design but all dependent on its historical facade. The new Qianmen will always be the new Qianmen as long as the façade stands.
Nostalgia is an oversimplification of the Chinese sentiment towards their capital. Exposing their own insecurity, hope for a better tomorrow is mis-attributed to the past. The new identity of Qianmen as an image projected to the outer world implied a default setting that ancient China equates Chinese culture, that nothing contemporary can define us as a nation. Further irony being that the "ancientness" on display is a distorted mutant of historical facade and foreign retail ownerships inside. The restoration of Qianmen was never about the uncanny replication of its historical facade, but how it represents our imagery of the glorious past. No matter how much it resembles the 20's, it does not belong to the city today, nor will it ever fit into our imagined past. As contemporaries, we will never be satisfied.
- anything, as an act or event, that serves as a stimulus and initiates or precipitates a reaction or series of reactions - to initiate or precipitate (a chain of events, scientific reaction, psychological process, etc. - to fire or explode (a gun, missile, etc.) by pulling a trigger or releasing a triggering device
FLOW
- move along or out steadily and continuously in a current or stream - circulate continuously within a particular system - (of people or things) Go from one place to another in a steady stream, typically in large numbers - result from; be caused by
+ "Flow refers to a multivalent series of notion and direction. This multivalent possibility of recipient information is coded and in certain cases subliminal - found in the city environment - and is our clue to the flow as a system of subjective criteria presented logically. The eidetic condition is revealed as object, a para-construct of the philosophical, political and cultural value of the taxonomy, where the arrangement is both one substance and time." (Yeoman, Andrew, "Movement, velocity, networks: backup infrastructures")
+ "As in Piranesi's engravings, the contemporary environment may be understood as an infinite interior of imprecise boundaries, where inhabitants are located in the form of a flow, converted into circulation. In this context, road infrastructure plays an important role in establishing an order that is not based upon formal criteria but upon abstract bits of information (on a motorway we can arrive at our destination without using geographical parameters, following only a discontinual set of messages) and immaterial properties such as the increase in the degree of connectivity within the territory that patches (or traces) of meaning provide, without which the order becomes more diffuse." (Valor, Jaume, "Interior Global")
+ "A trigger of one energy form sets off a flow in another which, in turn, triggers a release of a flow in the first; the insertion of more parties creates a chain of trigger-flow interactions that may go in series, in parallel or both...The trigger-flow interactions specifically create an interdependent reproduction among the participating dissipative structures." (De Landa)
reading: "A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History", De Landa
- capable of acting on or influencing each other - synergistic: used especially of drugs or muscles that work together so the total effect is greater than the sum of the two (or more) - providing output based on input from the user. This output feeds back into the user's decision process for subsequent interaction. Interactive websites, for instance, allow for more dynamic information browsing and applications such as shopping, banking, etc.
+"If objects think, react and take action beyond their material qualities, spaces and places have to react with them. Objects think because someone has thought about them. Someone has programmed and give them qualities so that they can be integrated into a new logic of the world in which everything is connected to everything." (Vincente Guallart, the metapolis dictionary of advanced architecture)
reading: "INTRODUCTION" in Organization Space: landscapes, highways, and houses in America
- lacking a true course toward a goal - not resulting directly from a single action or cause - involving intermediate or intervening parts or pathways. e.g. stimulation of one eye elicits narrowing of the pupil of the other eye by an indirect reaction
+ "...the secret to achieving a robust, adaptive, flexible, and evolving design." + out of control
+ the fear of architects, and the ineffective postulations between their design and proposed outcome.
URBANIST
- maximizing the effectiveness of a community's land use and infrastructure - focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment
+ "...find ways to approximate these ecological forces and structures, aspects of wild nature, to invent artificial means of creating living artificial environments."
+ a person in attempt to simulate evolutionary processes through artificial means in the urban context.
reading: "WILDNESS (Prolegomena to a New Urbanism)"
