
Elective
Hong Kong, 2017
Hong Kong, 2017
Hong Kong Condition
More than a city, Hong Kong is a condition, where diverse moments of human habitation collectively generate an un-paralleled urban ecology. This project focuses on challenging preconceived notions of how we see our cities, steering away from the prescribed notions of urbanism and architecture as abstract entity, where citizen and professionals are separated by a vast gulf, rather it seeks to re-address the link between the city and human habitation.
Hong Kong is a city that has always developed reactively, as a reaction to given conditions, be it political or geographically, in the process generating a unique identity that responds and adapts to situations. Conditions form the backdrop against which we live our daily life; they are the fragments that generate the public/social realm. They represent both the ambiguous line between the city and its citizens and the moment where coexistence between the physical and the meta-physical realms collide. Understanding Hong Kong as a series of conditions allows students to question and the same time understand the collective DNA of habitation and start a debate that anticipates rather than assesses, accepts rather than postulates.
Some of the most intense urban conditions in the planet are found in Hong Kong,
“ Condition/Hong Kong” seeks to uncover the process behind how the city operates: from the invisible interconnected networks to the adjustable and adaptive systems that HK constantly generates to survive and adapt.
Today, as several hundred million more people are expected to move to cities in East Asia over the next 20 years as economies shift from agriculture and manufacturing to services, when the China’s Pearl River Delta has overtaken Tokyo to become the world’s largest urban area in both size and population, Hong Kong is in a strategic position both geographically and politically to examine the role of what our cities are, rather than what they might become.
This course is based on “forensic” examination of the existing conditions, what we will define as the “here and now”. By looking at three broad areas of Hong Kong: Island, Kowloon and New Territories, we will assemble a book of these conditions. The title of the course deliberately, is a ratio, where “CONDITION” is in a direct relationship to HONG KONG. Each student will define three spaces from each location with a series of 3 pages, i.e. Kowloon will have three spaces, one space/week, each space defined by three pages. The 3 pages format is very important in establishing a catalogue system, a scientific index, structured into 3 components: 3D line drawings, black & white photograph and a short text. Imagine an ornithologist handbook, where each species is catalogued according to its: habitat, colour and food.
︎︎︎Hong Kong Condition II Book
Instructor
More than a city, Hong Kong is a condition, where diverse moments of human habitation collectively generate an un-paralleled urban ecology. This project focuses on challenging preconceived notions of how we see our cities, steering away from the prescribed notions of urbanism and architecture as abstract entity, where citizen and professionals are separated by a vast gulf, rather it seeks to re-address the link between the city and human habitation.
Hong Kong is a city that has always developed reactively, as a reaction to given conditions, be it political or geographically, in the process generating a unique identity that responds and adapts to situations. Conditions form the backdrop against which we live our daily life; they are the fragments that generate the public/social realm. They represent both the ambiguous line between the city and its citizens and the moment where coexistence between the physical and the meta-physical realms collide. Understanding Hong Kong as a series of conditions allows students to question and the same time understand the collective DNA of habitation and start a debate that anticipates rather than assesses, accepts rather than postulates.
Some of the most intense urban conditions in the planet are found in Hong Kong,
“ Condition/Hong Kong” seeks to uncover the process behind how the city operates: from the invisible interconnected networks to the adjustable and adaptive systems that HK constantly generates to survive and adapt.
Today, as several hundred million more people are expected to move to cities in East Asia over the next 20 years as economies shift from agriculture and manufacturing to services, when the China’s Pearl River Delta has overtaken Tokyo to become the world’s largest urban area in both size and population, Hong Kong is in a strategic position both geographically and politically to examine the role of what our cities are, rather than what they might become.
This course is based on “forensic” examination of the existing conditions, what we will define as the “here and now”. By looking at three broad areas of Hong Kong: Island, Kowloon and New Territories, we will assemble a book of these conditions. The title of the course deliberately, is a ratio, where “CONDITION” is in a direct relationship to HONG KONG. Each student will define three spaces from each location with a series of 3 pages, i.e. Kowloon will have three spaces, one space/week, each space defined by three pages. The 3 pages format is very important in establishing a catalogue system, a scientific index, structured into 3 components: 3D line drawings, black & white photograph and a short text. Imagine an ornithologist handbook, where each species is catalogued according to its: habitat, colour and food.
︎︎︎Hong Kong Condition II Book