ICE @ HK: End of the Year Construction Site Visit

As the end of the Year is approaching, we visited to our ongoing construction sites in Hong Kong Island and Kowloon.

They are at different stages of construction (demolition, preparation of foundation tender, foundation and pile cap work). It was good for the team to collectively see the progress of three of our projects, which are of different programs: mixed use residential pencil tower to mixed use apartment block and office building.

These first three projects will be heading for completion in 2017 before we can really confirm whether our designs work or completely fail...

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Tiffany Chow Tung, Liu Yiding, Jeremy Son, Susanne Trumpf

© 2015, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

ICE @ HK

We have put our focus back to the territory of Hong Kong. Currently working on six projects, that vary in scale, scope and stage, we are glad to bring back our expertise to our home base. Being a smaller design firm, we are always picky about our selected projects, balancing the interest we have for the site and the business potential of the project. Together with our JV partner from L&N Architects, we have currently taken on small to tiny sites with highly complex site constraints, ranging from topographical challenges to construction challenges.

With our hotel project in Shenyang still ongoing, we have stopped bidding for China jobs for over a year now. It has been a slow process of change in the way architecture is done in the PRC. With the current reconfiguration of power in China, architecture is also subject to change.

Architecture being a small potato in the bigger context of things, it is however a visual representation of the willingness of the 'power' to express the ideological direction, it is willing to take. Throughout the last two years, we have been working with clients in China, who may or may not haven't been reached yet by this new agenda. Still they have been pushing us into design territories, we already could anticipate, will cause problems within a short period of time.

Even more, being a commercial firm from abroad, our projects were sooner or later to collide between the healthy and needed correction in the market of architecture and the still existing vanity of certain clients to pursue their dreams of iconography and spectacle.

Being back to Hong Kong is a healthy process of humbling down, dealing with the local regulations and high construction costs only, complying with mandatory requirements of sustainability and insurances and health care for co-workers and even us unrelated construction staff. Solutions have to be found within a holistic understanding of a building. We are architects after all and not designers of dreams any longer.

Construction Log October: Hong Kong

Its been a hard ride for the past year with a very steep learning curve. But construction has started on our first stand alone tower in Hong Kong. Completion is expected in 2017.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Arthur Bel, Nico Millar, Travis Mok, Jeremy Son, Tiffany Chow Tung, Susanne Trumpf
Partnering Authorized Person: L&N Architects, Memphis Chao
Structural Engineer: Wong Cheng
RSE: Richmond

© 2015, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Back to Hong Kong and the Joy of Complexity of Planning

Not to disclose too much, but we are back to Hong Kong with three towers at different stages of submission to Building Department for building permit. After being a 'design consultant' in China and Vietnam for so long, we are glad to be back on our home turf with a complete involvement from our side throughout all stages of the design and construction. 

China still offers tremendous opportunities of design. It is a testing ground still for new ideas, yet for foreign architect it stays put at the idea stage only. Site visits and meetings during construction stages stay alibi and are mainly for catching up and personal bonding. We have been debating (and trying) to setup office in China as well, but were limited by too many factors that didn't allow us to run effectively a design AND built office. 

We decided last year to become rather local (and work in markets where we can accompany the construction more frequently) and start building again with a hands on approach, being involved at all times throughout the process from design to planning to construction. Being back in Hong Kong, projects are more intense as in front of our doorstep and the complexity of planning is met by very mature clients and markets, that pull together a large consultant team in order to built projects. 

One of our projects in Central is aiming for BEAM Plus Platinum (the highest Hong Kong green label certification). One of the requirements is the reduction of waste and material for which reason the project is tested structurally in a wind tunnel testing facility in order to qualify the potential environmental forces that meet the building. Yet, we have never been to such test lab and yesterday it was the first time our office visited the venue. We were obviously very excited by the lab, surprised by the enormous effort that is put into testing the structure under wind load and stunned by the beauty of the facility. 

The lab is a long tube with a model of the project at the end in front of a set of industrial suction fans. At the other far end a perforated tubular wall lets the air being sucked in and stabilised the wind flow. A grid of plastic cubes simulates the resistance on ground. When the fans start spinning, a wind speed of 50m/sec is generated, measured through the model and translated into a digital model. 

Besides the interesting new experience, the testing has an serious environmental dimension to it. The simulation helps to testify the structural calculation, helping in 90% of the cases to reduce structure further to the initial calculation by the engineer and provide enough data to built more efficiently with less material. When we talk about sustainability, it is not the green walls that matter but the intelligent planning, complex simulations and use of materials that define whether a project is 'truly green' or not.

Tribute to Victoria Park Swimming Pool

Summer is coming to an end. So is the life of the Victoria Park Outdoor Swimming Pool. It closed its gates yesterday at 10 pm for the last time.

Being a passionate swimmer myself, I am deeply saddened by the closure of this wonderful urban experience. For the past few years I have spent my daily morning swim in that pool. The best moments were at the beginning of the outdoor swimming season when water was freezing cold and only me and 10 lifeguards were around in the chilling morning sun. My children learned swimming in the pool. I was with them from the time of their first clumsy approaches in the water to the moment they glide naturally through the deep blue.

Nights at the pool where startling. The pool lied at the edge of Victoria Park, surrounded by the city that formed a formidable background to the scene. The moment the sun set, buildings began to sparkle. First as a reflection of the setting sun, then as a powerful skyline of artificial lights. Whoever knows Hong Kong, knows the seduction of its skyline at night: the fascination of the behemoth of urban invention and innovation.

And in the middle of the city was this giant pool (during hot summers a rather overheated jacuzzi) from where you could enjoy the beauty of the skyline. It always was a magical and surreal moment, floating in the water and watch the city passing by, day as night alike.

To me, the swimming pool and the already demolished Kai Tak airport were some of the few formidable metropolitan sights of Hong Kong. They were proofs of the intense effects and collisions of a hyper dense city. But they also demonstrated that you could be at peace within this moloch of a city; it showed that the collision and confrontation can create urban poetry at its best.

Opened in 1957, the pool has been one of the oldest outdoor pools of Hong Kong, one of the few with a 5m diving pool and a 50 m lap pool with a 10 m dive board. It also features a grand stand for public viewing and a restaurant with pool view. The beauty of the pool lies in its design of the boundaries to the surrounding park. The park landscape was seamlessly translating into the water landscape. Changing rooms were placed under the grand stand to reduce the architectural impact of the pool.

To my dissatisfaction, the newly constructed indoor pool next door is a large scale architectural mass, with no relation to the context. The design has not benefitted from the subtleness of the outdoor pool, nor from the function of a park as an urban open area for the public. An alien like, disproportionate podium block was designed, which rather resembles a shopping mall than a public swimming pool for leisure and enjoyment. It is understood that an indoor pool is a building, an outdoor pool is a landscape: However a six story disproportionate glass blob which seals off its interior from the surrounding park is a rather cynical answer towards a positive transformation of the city.

It is a shame as the city of Hong Kong missed the chance (again) to encourage excellency for its public buildings. Instead, they apply commercial and economic logic to their civic construction as well and neglect the social, spatial and historical components that have made Hong Kong what it is in the first place.

Luckily swimming requires a certain functionality. So I will find myself at peace with the new venue as long as it features a clean 50 m pool and enough space to swim.

However there must be a reason that the pool was one of the most beloved leisure venues of the citizens. During my last swim at 10 pm, there were a lot of people inside the pool. Most enjoyed the last opportunity to dive in a 5 m deep 50 m olympic size pool. In fact the bottom at 5 m was the most crowded as there will be no pool anymore of this depth. There was a large crowd at the stand, taking pictures of the great view, chatting with the lifeguards and silently but happily and enjoying the scene. Most likely some of them contemplated wether the new pool will be as enriching to the city as the old one.

When we left the pool as one of the last, we left with the certainty that Hong Kong has sacrificed another urban jewel of its glorious past to the genericness of the commercial world.

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Spatial or Social Preservation? - West Wing, Hong Kong

Preservation is a delicate issue in a city like Hong Kong, which is reinventing itself in a rather frequent cycle, creating radical paradigm shifts every 20-30 years. In that process of restructuring the city, the West Wing and Government Hill came under threat of demolition: A colonial, governmental cluster, built over the period of British rule over Hong Kong. With the Hong Kong Advisory Board closing this latest outrage of the public on this process of destruction and reinvention by granting the Grade I status of a monument, an uneasy silence fell over the debate on what to do with that premise in the future.

I always liked that building as it one of the few buildings in the city that embraces the fact that it sits on a steep slope (most of them tend to ignore the topography and just create a new flat ground). The West Wing is offering multiple levels of entries and acts as a sectional device at the foot of the mountain that becomes the Peak. On the points of interface between mountain and building, there were a few public anchor points, that are specifically highlighted architectural and volumetric: A retaining wall that extends into the ground lobby and a cantilevered box in the middle of the building, that acted as a canteen and event space. It is not necessarily a mind blowing building, but a modest proposal for a modern post war architecture.

Most importantly however is the fact, that the building hits Queen's Road Central at its front end, the most central of all Hong Kong roads, forming the spine of the CBD of the city. Its back end leads into an extensive green zone that contains the zoo, Hong Kong Park and eventually leads towards the Peak and its nature reserves around. The urbanism is fascinating around the building. City on one, nature on the other side. The West Wing is the wedge between the two. Unfortunately it is a hostile one as it is programmatically detached from both.

As usual in the debate about preservation in Hong Kong, it is not the architectural value that makes the building worth it, but the social condition it created and are now considered part of the collective memory. In case of the West Wing it was the public consultation counter (the first of its kind in a governmental building) and the cantilevered box that was hosting parties for young people once in a while. It made the building a very public space in the eyes of the people. It nearly introduced participative opportunities for the community. I guess this memory is growing stronger every day especially as the current government lacks the will to offer participation for the public. Neither is it willing to create opportunities for young people or emerging entrepreneurship.

When we were approached to do a proposal for the West Wing, we were wondering how we can enhance social conditions spatially. And how can we then make those spatial potentials social again. We wanted to transform the building, yet preserve its functional status as a public incubator inside a governmental compound.

Our proposal was a most simple one: We introduced an escalator that connects the lower urban fabric with the mid-level of the building that contains the cantilevered box as well as an upper plaza. Connecting the public spaces inside and outside the building by an external circulatory system manifests the social and public value of the building and allows to open the building for more civic functions (in fact as it used to be).

Unfortunately the building will be given back to the government and the legislative counsel which will make it highly unlikely to be open to public ever again. Being a security fortress now, the building will finally be a very hostile one to the urban fabric. The question remains if a demolition of the building would have not been more beneficial in the end as it would have introduced commercial spaces as well as civic functions to the site. Even more unfortunate at this point is that the initiative which was fighting for the remain of the West Wing is silent since the building is preserved. And this although the West Wing is even more demolished and stripped of its social function at this point.

Although spatial preservation is guaranteed, the building lacks its socially relevant dimension by converting it to a state of privateness and disclosure.

In regards to the debate whether or not West Wing deserves a Grade I Preservation status, our Louise Low has presented an article to the public to the debate in April:

 A Modest Proposal

A casual urban wanderer through the verdant hillside along Battery Path, behind the HSBC tower, may look up and wonder about the curious building perched at the top - its facade has not been usurped by giant billboards, display merchandise do not crowd its windows, its structure is unadorned by LED lights. In the midst of the shimmering edifices driven by commercial and economic impulses, it silently advertises itself as a concrete anomaly in the vortex of heavy traffic, a fort against the flux of alluring goods and money.

The staid West Wing, together with the Central and East Wing, is part of the conglomerate of former Central Government Offices (CGO) in an area marked as “Government Hill.” 

Plotted at a fengshui-blessed axis to the Government House and the Court of Final Appeal, it housed the body of the Civil Service workhorse tasked with the straight forward mandate of safeguarding the interests of Hong Kong and its people. The psyche geography of the triumvirate as guardian is etched in the undulating topography of Government Hill.

Built in the 1950s, the CGO’s abandonment of the florid, conservative neo-classical colonial tradition and embrace of post-war Modernism paved the way for Hong Kong's first steps towards an image of the City as reflected by the "International Style" movement, harbinger of new social and political ideals. The symbols of state power and class structure gave way to a more global and egalitarian aesthetic.

Spartan minimalism and structural exposure spoke of an honesty, integrity and openness, of a more idealistic era when "government" seemed closer to the ordinary lives of people as mirrored in its modest, streamlined architecture.

Meticulous documentation in defense of its essence can be found in a sensitive publication by CUHK, “The Greatest Form has No Shape” and on the website “http://www.governmenthill.org/”, with embedded videos of significant emotional impact - an interview with the former Director of public Works, Michael Wright, describing the assiduous search for iron-free granite from Diamond Hill, as well as a silent film of the construction crew, both men and women, hewing stoically, shaping the land’s destiny with the same tenacity and fierce determination of those used to “eating bitter” - scornful of obstacles, unfazed under the blistering heat of mid-summer.

These will likely be all that is left of the history and collective societal memory embodied in these structures should current government plans to sell and redevelop the much coveted site forge ahead.

While the announcement of intent tiptoes nervously around talk of more profit accruing to government coffers, the debate hinges on the relative “lack of architectural merits” of the buildings. Some find them “ugly.”

Indeed, they are “ugly” among the diamond-cut designer towers in Central the way a well-worn white cotton shirt is “ugly” next to highly embellished, lavish designer fashion.

Grim, austere, dour, astringent, stern, stark...a monastery whose architecture conveyed the clarity of purpose, that of chaste, dedicated service.

The aesthetic of simplicity and humility is understandably anathema to the current vogue for flashier architecture. It evokes a nostalgia of a different Hong Kong society. It offers a provocative contrast, and a rebuke to excesses. 

As night follows day, the pendulum inevitably swings. 

The economy of the past decade, inebriated on free-flowing liquidity and bubbly real estate, sprouted fantastical, mega-budget, iconoclastic architecture of an irrational exuberance in important cities all over the world. The precipitous fall of the ill-fated $1.2billion Millennium Dome of London and the Experience Music Project of Seattle from feted trophies to mocked effigies come to mind. 

As bubbles burst and the hangover sets in, have our eyes made the necessary, timely adjustment in the cold light of day to judge with dry lucidity an architecture from a more sober age while under the lingering influence of the taste for intoxicating monumental follies?

From the perspective of preservation, does aesthetics even matter? Styles emerge from the history of a society, and the imperative of history is to record and narrate past truths, to capture their meaning for the unfolding present and future.

Buildings are not preserved based on market worth, maintenance costs or beauty but on the merits of their social meaning, singularity, urban memory and historic relevance.

Examples of preserved modernity include Tel Aviv’s “White City” which was awarded Unesco World Heritage status in 2003. In recognition of the need, the World Monument Fund launched “Modernism at Risk”, an advocacy and conservation program for Modern buildings in 2006. (see http://www.wmf.org/advocacy/modernism)

It is no surprise, then, that a government which now prides itself on its business acumen should offer up more bargains. After all, Hong Kong is the proverbial shopper’s paradise, the erasure of its history and a lobotomized memory is but a small price to pay for fattened public coffers. 

As what’s good for big business is good for Hong Kong, an unlimited Plot Ratio and GFA should be offered to the highest bidding developers who may jointly build, market and sell as much as they may possibly wring out of the site. Whom but the most endowed, wealthy and powerful elite in Hong Kong deserve the right to move into Government Hill? 

Finally, this symbolic demolition of the last frontier between the public and the private will no doubt be an event as celebrated in Hong Kong as the Fall of the Berlin Wall. To maximize proceeds, the government could auction the buildings piece by piece on eBay to serial sentimentalists or enterprising opportunists who flip them for even greater gains. It is not that the remnants of these buildings and what they once represent should not be consigned to the dustheap of history, but why should every last stone not be parlayed into payoff?

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Claudia Wigger, Matteo Biasiolo, Celine Clivaz, Jorge Gil Suarez, Sevan Spiess

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Challenges of Hyperdensity and Vertical Urbanism

Hong Kong has one of the densest urbanized areas in the world. Densification has been consistently pushed higher over the last 50 years. From the traditional chinese shophouse dwelling which barely exceeded two stories and created a low rise high density, the density in metropolitan areas of the city reaches for domestic use alone up to plot ratio 10 nowadays.

While the traditional urban density consisted of low rise high density structures, a building had a large surface as space, serving as a public interface and semi public realm. In urbanized areas buildings were mainly shophouses with 2-4 floors of which the ground floor was commercial and public space for the inhabitants of the building. Its floor ratio of public and private space was around 1:1.

The challenge to the densification of the city is not the fact that buildings get taller. The challenge is the ratio of public space to private space, which disadvantages the public space exponentially. Even more, the building codes favor prescriptive measures to maintain public spaces (indoor or outdoor alike) at the bottom 4-6 floors. It implies that the city is not divided anymore by the plan layout of roads but by a sectional division of a small and condensed public city below 6 floors and a massive private city up to 50 floors above that datum. The floor ratio between private space and public space (as per maximum allowable number of floors for each area) shifts to a 12:1 ratio in the current metropolitan environment. As street profiles remain the same within redeveloped areas, the increased density affects the quality of the urban environment.

The implications on the city are huge and visible all over the city. Recent transformations are accelerated by the construction of new MTR lines around the city. The effects of the density are affecting especially those old areas of the city that have evolved along the hillsides: Smaller streets and thinner blocks are dictated by the topography. A random urban quarter in Sai Ying Pun around the Centre Street Market - one of the oldest districts in Hong Kong - shows the dramatic effects of the density increase in relation to the narrow road network:

The pressure on the street and the ground floor level as a last resort for public space for an dominating privatized city above is immense and leads to a deterioration of the built (and unbuilt) environment. 

Yet the basic sectional configuration (of public and commercial space on lower floors, private space above) has remained the same up to today, the ratio has shifted dramatically in favor of the private space. 

The question arises if the regulations are too traditional for cities that shift towards a high density environment? Particular in Hong Kong, the reality of the regulations is of prescriptive nature rather than descriptive, leaving little room for flexibility and adaptability of architecture. 

Understanding the commercial driving force behind the maximization of private (sellable) space, yet with limited space for public and commercial activities left, the management and distribution of those should be revisited and made more flexible in favor of a better sectional condition of the vertical cities. 

Being great supporters of hyper densification of our metropolitan environments, our design practice is always confronted with the limitations of the building codes and their simple plan oriented codes. The acceptance the plan itself as the main planning guideline ignores the complexity of high density environments; a complexity which affects plan, section, profiles in a more challenging way with way more negative side effects than it would do in a low density environment.

The question remains why vertical and sectional zoning has not been introduce yet as guidelines for a high density environment. For the benefit of improved living conditions and better urban environments, two dimensional planning has to consider more the reality of three dimensional potentials. Vertical Urbanism has been the focus of our commercial practice as well as of our academic research.

Solutions we are currently investigating as a feasibility study are the potentials of updating sectional planning parameters for high density environments, such as introducing a verticality ratio as well as vertical parcel lots:

© 2013, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

What makes a Mixed-Use Development?

We conducted this research in 2010, in order to understand the complexity of the most common contemporary typology: The Mixed-Use Development. The introduction of this typology with a podium-tower-configuration has radicalized and transformed the use of the city over the past fifty years. What we were interested in is what kind of programs make a successful development, how is the programmatic distribution influencing the typology and what kind of circulatory systems are used to activate such a complex and large scale development. The action field of our research was Hong Kong, where the urbanization has radicalized more than in other cities in terms of density, hybridization of program and innovation in typological mix.

Various developments have been analyzed based on the programmatic mix, the vertical distribution of program (Podium-Tower) and the vertical circulatory system. The result of this research is a compendium of mixed use typologies and their content:

The interesting aspect is, that the architecture of such mixed use complexes is rather irrelevant, as they develop an internalized microcosmos of architectural urbanism. Interior has replaced architecture as a form of cultural identity. Program has replaced space as a form of social identity.

As architects, a strong and blatant emphasis on economic and commercial activities of a development makes us feel hurt in our self esteem. The core knowledge of our discipline as the masters of space doesn't apply here. We feel threatened and ignored. Yet these developments create life in a much more powerful way than our understanding of space could ever give birth to. And indeed, we should feel threatened by the fact, that not the architect is the one who determines the vibrancy of the urban life, but the developer and the business consultant.

As those developments are extremely successful throughout the world in terms of generating life and urban activities within themselves, they are worth a deeper theoretical architectural investigation. What they can teach us is a lesson that we could apply back to the core city, a lesson on how to activate the city through the hybridization of architecture and urbanism.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Chak Pui Chuen, Chan Kam Fung, Chan Wai To, Cheung Wan Tao, Lai Lok Sung, Lau Ming Yan, Lee Lit Hei, Lloyd-Evans Jane Louise, Lui Kam Fung, Woo Yin Shan, Yan Kit Man, Yuen Suet Ying

© 2011, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

Radical Mix in Hong Kong

Density in Hong Kong has accelerated the transformation of architectural typologies, which is nowhere else in the world to be found. The city has become an experimentation ground for high density vertical environments. It is the most important case study for the good and the bad of city of the future.

Mixed Use has always always an imminent parameter in the typological development of Hong Kong. Scale and configuration has changed over the years, but the general condition of a hybridization of a building has remained. And this is the biggest difference to the Western Modernism, which was more inclined to segregate and separate function.

The starting point for the Radical Mix is the traditional shophouse: the hybrid of living and working under the same roof. Other than the western townhouse, it has been a typology of complexity, incorporating gardens and patios to separate and integrate the various users in a micro urbanism, rather than in a building.

With the increased modernization and densification of the city, this model of the shophouse has not been questioned, but taken as a foundation for the Radical Mix. The explosive growth of Hong Kong after the second world war fell into a time, when modernist urban visions were discussed (again): The most successful impact on the urban development of the city in terms of typology and environmental issues must have been La Ville Radieuse and its vision for the high rise residence with free views, inside, but far away from the city.

La Ville Radieuse, le Corbusier's answer to the question of sustainability at that time, was criticized by urban theorists such as Gaston Bardet for being environmentally unsound in terms of urban microclimate and human comfort. Bardet, through his drawings of shadow casting, illustrated that the design and layout of the building blocks would, in fact, create lots of overshadowing zones which do not receive any sunlight for long periods in the winter time. With wind flow and cold winter temperatures, these overshadowing zones could bring about intolerable thermal conditions to pedestrians during the coldest months of the year.

What is unexpected is that these impossible conditions caused by the shadows created the opposite in tropical and sub-tropical Hong Kong where the millions of a new boom generation found in these shadow zones and wind ravines relief from searing heat, creating a milieu for public space and a new urbanism was born where there was barrenness before. The development of mass transit systems freed the wide streets from cars and vehicular traffic, and the subway seamlessly connect one neighborhood to another.

Like the undergrowth of a rainforest, a lively, complex street culture thrives in astonishing configurations beneath the Asian Plan Voisin, oblivious to the thoughts of the most celebrated architect of our time who would have surely approved. Driven by commercial and economic impulses, the configurations take on the nature of the old neighborhood fabric, their DNA bears the imprimatur of their cultural and societal context despite the modernity of the constructions.

The process hits a plateau, however, when the demand for a more ideal micro-climate leads to air-conditioning and an envelope, and the podium mall materializes as a result. Designed by a centralized architectural authority, malls become increasingly a closed system that manifest entropy, a state of inert uniformity that metastasized throughout Asian cities. Yet nowadays, the Radical Mix is a successful economic model, which impacts the city's life and environment far more than we would have ever expected. It's micro urbanism has developed a level of sophistication, which has lead to near autonomous and self sustainable conditions. The resulting form however, starts to counterproductive to the city fabric as a place for public and public life.

With increasing overheating of the city due to the heat island effect of the podium tower typology, an acceleration of road side pollution due to the street canyon effect, one is inclined to question, if the current status of the podium tower typology is counterproductive to the city. Hong Kong's temperature in urbanized areas have peaked last year due to the nocturnal heat radiation. Most affected were the areas with the highest concentration of mixed use podium tower buildings.

Those areas are also affected by increased road side pollution, and effect, which is worsened by the accelerated wind speed through the needle like towers, that acts as a cap for the pollutants from vehicles, containing them on the immediate pedestrian level. The resulting deterioration of the street as a positive public space, leads ironically as a countermeasure to a further increase in interior public spaces in form of podium tower mixed use developments.
Studies have shown the negative effects of a density, driven by the hyper podium tower typology. It is up to the developer and the architect to draw conclusions from there towards a more sustainable typology. The wellbeing of the city is in the interest of the architecture as well. Therefor it becomes our most important duty, to incorporate a more expansive view of Architecture, to refocus energy into the larger context of living, especially in the understanding of how others live and our implications on their kind of environment. To simultaneously create and be created by the forces of the context, architecture is no longer an object, but also a subject in the larger scheme of things: Architecture must perform, not just form within that realm.

Team: Ulrich Kirchhoff, Louise Low, Lai Lok Sung

© 2011, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

West Kowloon Cultural District - Oops, he did it again!

It is official, that Foster won again the West Kowloon Cultural District - after the victory in the 2004 competition over hist competitors OMA and Rocco. While in 2004 it was the giant bris soleil, which wetted the eyes of the jury, now it is the the giant water front park.

The others won't be too sorry over the loss, I guess, as they walk away with a HKD 50 Million concept design fee each, a sum, unbelievable these days for a concept master plan only.

Although there lie seven years between the two competitions, nothing has changed much in terms of the content of that project: In 2004, hopes were high. The design brief for that competition was talking about a 'world-class' cultural center, the involvement of Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim and all big players in the cultural industry. Shortly after the announcement of the winning entry, both, Centre Pompidou and Guggenheim renounced their engagement, as it was culturally and commercially not feasible. The project was shelved. The government had to realize, that Hong Kong did not have any major art collection, nor any major art collectors, which would put the project on solid ground.

Hence, it took them another six years, to rethink the strategy. Eventually, they had to react to the cultural defeat in 2004. In the meantime, planning and construction for a major train station just next to the site is underway. The high speed train will connect Hong Kong with Guangzhou, Wuhan and other Chinese cities. It will be most likely the biggest singular arrival points for tourists, coming to Hong Kong. And they come with a lot of cash, which the city is trying to get out of them.

And here lies also the dilemma of the entire project: As the train stops in the middle of nowhere, the government was forced, to develop this land concurrently, not to let millions of visitors flood into barren land and get a bad start with the city. The idea of 'Hong Kong Culture welcomes you' was born: A shopping paradise for Bruce Lee action figures, dim sum restaurants, action movies and a beautiful view over the harbor. To upgrade the sentimental shopping mall, to fit into the self proclaimed image of 'Hong Kong - Asia's World City', western high culture should give a good alibi.

As culture did not succeed so well in 2004, the 2010 competition was putting emphasis on the 'people', trying to get support from the local community. It should be a place for people, for the Hong Kongers to enjoy and celebrate their hometown. For the same people, who have seen a steep rise in property prizes in recent years with an actual decrease in living area, yet a decline in income and salaries. They should enjoy the water front and a gigantic park in a fairly inaccessible part of a city, which lies in sub tropical climate with a heavy rainy season, typhoons from May to September, burning sun throughout most of the year. Usually people gather here closer to shelter and buildings, as the safety of a dry place can be a benefit here. And as (affordable) housing is still the main problem of the city, the need for culture is fairly insignificant, compared to that. Yet, what the city does lack is an urbanized waterfront, highly mixed use, programmatically dense and a larger portion of housing.

As the winning scheme puts this park at the waterfront, it certainly upgrades the value for the adjacent buildings, which we can imagine with very expensive flats, overlooking an empty park towards Hong Kong side. Yet, the scheme stays on the level of low density, which creates a rather smaller amount of built area. What a stunning view of course, and what a possible price tag attached...It is a scheme, which reveals the true intention of the project. To transform a disadvantaged site into a luxury property heaven. And for that, the scheme does it quite well.

I forgot to mention the aspect of culture: Shortly before announcement of the final results of the 2011 competition, the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District resigned. Maybe him too, could not really find a good cultural reason for the project and gave up.

I personally think, the OMA entry is the best of the three projects. But it is also the most naive, trying to create an urban fabric, which in fact is really for the people, urban fragmentation, variety, scalar and programmatic change. Despite its naivety, it reminds me positively of a quote by Niemeyer, I read, when I started studying architecture. When Niemeyer was asked about his membership in the communist party, he said it is a duty for an architect to be communist, because his foremost responsibility is for the user, for the people. Unfortunately, naivety is a high value, most of the architects have lost in the last 20 years of accelerated property activities.

To conclude, I need to refer to developer client of ours, who had a brilliant idea at a conference, we attended about the West Kowloon Cultural District. He said, instead of giving the project to three firms to design only, the government should let ALL the architecture firms in Hong Kong, big or small, participate and design and build at least one building each.

We'll second that. And this would truly be a concept, worth HKD 50 Mil. And who knows, maybe we will see a third competition within the next few years and then, the winner hopefully is someone else.

© 2011, ice - ideas for contemporary environments

InCityvism

'You know, it’s life that’s always right and the architect who’s wrong' le Corbusier

Meet the Boss

Time? he asks. He has time, he has no time. What is my business?

Architect? He flicks his cigarette. You looking for loan? he asks. No? His sharks told him a lot of new customers are architects. Bad economy, no jobs. Don't worry, he pats me on the shoulder, if I can't pay, he has karaokes, massage and mahjong parlors for me to renovate. I owe money, I work for him. He doesn't cut off hands. That is my rice bowl.

I give you tip when next Bubble coming, ok? he offers helpfully. You no idea how much hot money we help important people launder, people in high places.

Oh.

So you want only talk? You not some tricky reporter? I believe. You don't have guts to lie to me. He laughs.

I explain I want to understand his side of the City.

To him, it was obvious enough. See, you design the buildings but I own the streets, he says. Life begins at the street where the buildings end. But no buildings, no streets. So I thank you for your buildings and you thank me for bringing life to your buildings. He gestures in the air between us.

The man has a point. Hong Kong is a vertiginous, postcard perfect conglomerate of diamond-cut towers - a Darwinian experiment in overdrive that bloomed a thousand architecture species.

This is clearest from the heights of Victoria Peak miles above the city. In the clarified air, the unfamiliar blast of ozonic oxygen induces hallucinatory headiness. Below, the traffic of humans and machines resemble ants in a clockwork maze of proto structures - a wonderland of edifice unfolds where architecture periods are shuffled like the cards of a deck and then exponentially multiplied to apparent infinity. En masse, the result careens towards psychotropic chaos than Euclidian geometry, a fantastical, wild, impenetrable labyrinthian fractal garden both realistic and artificial, perfumed by acid.

But it is also the spaces in between the buildings and the relationships between them that reconfigure the city. With organized complexity emerge urban webs and social intelligence.Although buildings, roads and topography crystallize a city’s image, they are not all of its constitution. It is the inhabitants who rapidly and unapologetically appropriate it, redrawing, remaking, reclaiming, in acts that contribute most significantly to the meaning of the place. The City cannot be conceived in separation from its events, both scarred by its past and to be carved by its future.

Architects big ego. The Boss grins in mocking humor, teasing. You think you make nice buildings, it makes nice City? No Life, no City! You better think more about Life!

You want to learn Life? Watch me.

Big banks, big companies, big shopping, they own the buildings, they run the economy up there. Me, I own the streets, I protect the newspaper stands, the illegal vendors, the prostitutes, the mini-buses, the entertainment industry.

See how I make sure they get handsome guys to play me in movies.

Entertainment? There is no entertainment like street life. Watch people, or show off yourself. It is free. Everyone can afford. Hungry? Eat for $10 (€1) at my street stalls.

Protect the streets from what? From corrupt cops, stupid.

Everyone has to make a living. Everyone has his place. This is a friendly evolution. There is plenty of room for losers. Everything that exists tends to find space for its existence - the drop-outs of society will be accommodated in the cracks that make the structure meta-stable.

We are bad guys, he continues, we admit. But we are not worst guys. Some big business are more ruthless. They are our biggest customers. They pay some of our cold-blooded guys to do things they don't want to dirty their hands with. They own the government, they own everything. But they don’t own us.

Does he know that architects aren't always helpless spectators, that Hong Kong once existed in the dream of an architect? There was someone prescient, who foresaw a radiant towering city like Hong Kong, almost a century ago. To know where we are, we've got to understand how we got here.

Le Corbusier? The Crow? You also give yourselves names? He is amused. One of my best fighters, everyone calls him The Swallow.

Among architects and fighters, in assuming the identity of a bird, is there a desire to take flight, to wander alone, to leave earth-bound companions, a yearning to understand the larger universe, to transcend like Icarius, to commute with vast skies and higher ideals, to risk burning by the sun? Overcoming the mind to allow the heart to soar?

Perhaps our best ideas are like birds, they remain caged until we choose liberty. Early in his career, Le Corbusier knew he had to think in solitude, to act alone in pursuit of new knowledge - he was traveling, stunned by Berlin, Vienna, and most of all the metropolis of Paris which he described as “the crack of the whip at every moment, death for dreamers.” (Note 1, Pg. 41)

“Time spent in Paris is time well spent, to reap a harvest of strength. Paris the immense city of ideas - where you are lost unless you remain severe with yourself.” Le Corbusier wrote in letters. (Pg41)

“My concept is now clear - further on I will give you details of its instigations and basis. To draw it up, I lost no time in daydreaming. It is broad, I am enthusiastic about it, it punishes me, carries me away on wings, when my inner strength shouts:”You can.” (Pg. 42)

Anchored and reassured in the fraternity, there must be moments of lucid awakening and acute alienation when one is seized by pure and authentic impulses to break away, to take off in a self-imposed exile, to face difficult new truths alone, for it takes a different kind of courage. It isn’t so much about the journey to other cities than to go to a faraway place within oneself.

“One speaks of an art of tomorrow. This art will be, because humanity has changed its way of living and thinking. The program is new.” (Pg. 45)

Yes, The Crow, he saw a shiny city similar to Hong Kong, the vast population secured in airy towers, with Nature flourishing below. I showed him images of Ville Radieuse, a century old. A neat rectilinear network of skyscrapers crosshatched with wide highways for automobiles, freeing the podium for manicured parks. He holds them up and frowns.

We don't make parks below the towers, he snorts, what waste. We make urban jungle for “yan lau”, people flow, lifeblood of cities. Jungle is more exciting, more unpredictable, more dangerous, more dirty, more real. More human.

After you get mobbed by our jungle you will appreciate Nature. He adds, laughing sarcastically.

Le Corbusier wrote, “I have been very careful not to depart from the technical side of my problem. I am an architect: no one is going to make a politician of me. “A Contemporary City” has no label, it is not dedicated to our existing Bourgeois-Capitalist society nor to the Third International. It is a Technical work....”

“Things are not revolutionized by making revolutions. The real Revolution lies in the solution of existing problems.” (Pg.141)

To Le Corbusier, his visionary plans weren’t about politics but solutions, yet the consequences are nothing less than revolutionary.

Among his critics, Gaston Bardet warned the shadows cast by the towers of the Ville Radieuse would create a ville ombreuse and a

climat de cave. This unfortunate effect is most felt in the highrise projects of the suburbs of Europe, the banlieues, where the jagged wind whips through the desolate ravines between towering blocks, concrete schisms and social vacuums, where it echoes the inner turbulence of unemployed youths and percolates with the tumult of violent gangs and the collisons with steel-jawed police.

This Le Corbusian tale, however, is spun into two cities. The late 20C urban environments in hot, humid tropical Asia thrive as a result of these microclimatic consequences. Streets and alleys are cooled by the towering shadows, enough to encourage pedestrians to abandon the air-conditioned cocoons of the buildings and the chilled belly of the subway. In Hong Kong, the furrows between edifices, the “terrain vague” at the podium and street level, the voids of Ville Radieuse/Ombreuse hold promise of the possible, of transformation and expectations of human energy.

Parasitical connections, walkways and linkages copulate, fuse and fall in together until the point is reached when everything coalesces into a perfervid web. Relationships intensify in parallel - the escalation of traffic attract free-wheeling commerce and nuclei of mercantilism spring up by the thousands.

As an urban rhizome, connected from its skybridges to the bowels of its subway, networked to near territorial infinity by intricate metro systems and trains, they weave a matrix upon which the prosperous metropolis thrives, by-passing some of the most spectacular nature of South China, mountains, sand and sea, leaving them pristine. Its staggering monumental density belies the fact that this is an unexpectedly sustainable model for millions. (Note 2)

Le Corbusier did not foresee that the humanity stacked up in his immaculate cruciforests will burst from their fortresses into the free-flowing ground below, hungry for the liberation from the immobility of their vertical lives, luxuriating in the flux of the streets. The towers are scalar fields, the pent-up energy in them disperses by the millions into the podium and streets where fertile mercantile imagination found thousands of ways to capture their fleeting attention, if not their wallets, stomachs, hearts and minds.

The walks brim over with fake and real merchandise, delights from a thousand and one nights, of ambrosial aromas, torrid flavors and €1 gourmets, of rats the size of shoes, of hectic markets larger than many small cities where the intrepid vendor of sundry goods shrieks his wares with the fury of a street prophet.

The result of the inverse relation of the towers and the streets, the Ville Ombreuse, allows a bewildering number of shadier, tenacious, adventurous lifeforms to flourish and multiply in micro-economies and macroecologies.

What would Le Corbusier make of this? At the end of his life, Le Corbusier made a remark of utmost humility and philosophical irony, “You know, it’s life that’s always right and the architect who’s wrong.” (Pg.144) It can be surmised he would have been thrilled at the wild, abundant Life that is unleashed in Hong Kong by architecture, if not architects.

As the lights dim in the business towers towards the night, the power switches over to ignite the overflowing podium malls and streets where swarms of homo economicus brush up rapturously against homo volatilis in the neon crucible of Hong Kong.

The streets are vectors, lines of flight for homo volatilis, a street fugitive on the run, not so much as escape routes but as a diffused conurbation of refuge, until fortunes are overturned, which they will in the yin and yang of things.

Flight or fight, his violent strategies are rooted in ancient codes of honor. In the embrace of a fatal, existential conundrum, he finds philosophical euphoria in a centuries old brotherhood and unknowingly plucks a page from Camus. He thus transcends the futile fight for the ever-elusive material and social success that signal insider status and the path to respectability.

But what makes some fly while others fall? Movies are an odd place to look for clues to the psyche of cities, yet they compress and unravel in relentless motion frames both the inescapable angst of societies and at times, point to their salvation. The spirit of Hong Kong is especially manifested in the most popular of its exports - its movies.

To know what Hong Kong is, one must understand what Hong Kong isn’t.

No other movie provides a contrasting frame of highrise reference than the brilliant, shattering film “La Haine” by Mathieu Kassovitz, a film about the banlieues of Paris. In the introduction, a ghostly, dismembered voice recounts a terrifying Falling, juxtaposed against grainy images of angry protestors, clashing riot police and uncompromising barricades. The character described the feeling of someone plunging from a tower of 50 floors, muttering on his way down past each floor,

"So far so good...

"so far so good..."

“How you fall doesn't matter. It's how you land!”

Falling, like a blazing comet, through slivers of glass shards, hurtling towards the bull’s eye of infinity in a shower of light, to burn out at the point of impact.

The towering projects of the banlieues speak of a division that isn’t mathematical, of a life trapped in cages up in the air, perfecting parkour at knife’s edge, overlooking the violence and the void of existence below, peering at the gathering storm of riot police and youths in the streets, of the recurring nightmare of the apocalypse.

A skyscraper city of nothingness is one that pulls vulnerable souls with the full gravitational force towards its spinning vitreous vortex.

In the eye of the concrete and steel maelstrom, Hong Kong seems to have defied gravity. People do fall in equally spectacular fashion in Hong Kong movies, but before they crash, invisible wires seem to yank them buoyantly into the air, levitating into fantastical aerial flips, leaping across roofs and soaring over the streams of traffic. From above the rise and fall of the cityscape, one is struck by the deluge of abundance, of a million scintillating possibilities. Violence is subverted by grace, the long arc of action, the flight of the psyche at escape velocity, for nothing is more central to its beauty and coherence than this lucidity.

The mark of Hong Kong action movies, the realization of their breathtaking choreography is inspired by the redemption found in the city, understanding that in the liquid torrents of the city, we are in perpetual motion, that we are headed somewhere, that there is a future unfolding, that transition is a state of polymorphic freedom.

We triads run but we do not hide. We have our codes of “yi hei” - honor, loyalty, justice, he intones dourly. We swear in blood before Lord Kwan (a historic general renowned for his integrity and valor, the god of the triads,) to protect the brotherhood. Or Kwan Kong will come slit our throat when we dream. What about you architects?"

Nodding, I explained in the affirmative.

You honor humanity? You serve society?! Really?

He laughs so hard he spits out his toothpick, his chair falls precariously backwards, his spittle flies over my laptop. Wiping tears from his eyes, he snorts, you honor HSBC, you slave to Li Ka Shing (the richest man in HK) and you kiss-ass to the government!

Indignant, I protest. Most of us in Hong Kong are but bread and butter wage peons bending to the mighty winds of influential men, and we're not without concerns and an incremental sense of responsibility for...the Earth.

Green? Sustainability? Grow vegetables on walls? He asks incredulously. You so funny, poor people have been living "sustainable" for all of human history, and then the rich and the government toxic dump in their backyard.

Even a bad man like me don't poison poor people. No morals. He shakes his head.

Now a lot more middle class people are joining the poor, so of course you have to prepare them for "sustainable living,” he adds sarcastically.

Turning hot and red at the glib facetiousness, I challenged him with a catalogue of crimes.

He lights up his cigarette with a fake $100 note afire. Counterfeiting? Look, a bowl of noodles costs $10 a dozen years ago. Today, it is $30. Inflation is more paper money chasing the same goods. You are right, it is a type of robbery of people who save every cent. Somebody has been printing lots of money, my friend, and it is not me."

Whoring? You want to blame me for running the oldest profession in the world? Let me tell you some of my best customers are police officers and politicians.

He turns defensive. I run mahjong parlors, they run a bigger casino, the stock market. People win or lose a few hundred dollars at my game, they lose their life savings in the finance market. They think they are "investing", not gaming. Now that is daylight robbery.

Such is Life.

The lights are out as I leave. I slowly climb the pedestrian bridge and momentarily pause at a point where the streets of Causeway Bay converged like mighty rivers below me in between towering canyons, where an expressway swerves dangerously at eye level close to where I stand, startled by the rush of warm diesel-smoked air, the blinding psychotropic flares of the on-coming headlights and the deafening roar of unstoppable traffic. The ebb and flow of cars, trucks, buses and swarms of crowds resemble stampeding herds of elephants, zebras and wildebeests - marauding tribes and charging metallic beasts under a neon-lit sky, illuminating the ferocious truths behind the glittery promises of modern post-industrial societies, subverting its false optimism. This societal vertigo, this material abyss, this adamantine poetry. My adrenaline pumped, in a state of simultaneous disorientation, exhilaration and clarity, I am returned to a primordial self - a hunter and gatherer of a jungle terrifying in its radiance.

(Note 1) The quotes of Le Corbusier are excerpted from “Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture” by Charles Jencks, published in year 2000 by The Monacelli Press

(Note 2) Hong Kong’s 2009 per capita carbon footprint (29 tonnes) may be among the highest in the world, yet it is due mainly to its voracious consumption of imports. The actual domestic per capita footprint (17% of its total carbon footprint) generated as a result of this living model is among the lowest for developed countries, at 6.7 tonnes.

Team: Louise Low

© 2010, ice - ideas for contemporary environments