(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)

Chapter 48

Public spheres

Hong Kong’s interior urbanism

Jonathan D. Solomon

Hong Kong is a city where extreme conditions bring the everyday into sharper focus.$^1$ It is also a city in which intense artificiality belies the simple divisions between public and private that tend to dominate the politics of the interior. Hong Kong’s density, topography, and economy create an urbanism that lacks any of the figure-ground relationships that traditionally bring order to public space in either Western or Eastern tradition: there is no axis, edge, or center. Even the ground itself is elusive: streets, courtyards, and squares are replaced by multilevel walkways connecting shopping malls and transit terminals.$^2$ The pedestrian networks stretching for kilometers across Hong Kong create an urbanism of continuous “interiority” that does not always correlate to the “indoors.” These distinctions are further blurred by the highly manufactured quality of the city’s outdoor atmosphere; pungent with smells, heavy with particulate matter, buffered by light and noise, and hemmed in by walls, the “outdoors” is no less a manufactured

environment than the indoors. The city – indoors and out – is a vast and continuous interior.

It is common to find pedestrians streaming through corridors routed through corporate lobbies, above public parks, or under streets (rather than at grade) in order to stay cool and dry. Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another. The full range of human senses are implicated: in Central, a high-end shopping mall branded by Armani is distinguished from an adjacent and connected mall catering to Filipino foreign domestic workers by, among other things, prodigious scents. Just across a footbridge over Chater Road, varying access to natural light affects retail rents at the Landmark Mall. Up the hill along the Central and Midlevels Escalator, a crowd of tourists and Western expatriates gathers on a street of steep steps in much the same way. Cool air is not the only atmosphere generated by the adjacent pubs: the smell of beer, cigarettes, and grilling beef, the sounds of generic rock and roll, English-language chatter, and clinking glasses form a microclimate distinct from the local street market just a block away.

Figure 48.1 Central Temperatures. Temperature and humidity gradients define the Public “Spheres of Hong Kong.”

Drawing by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon, and Clara Wong

Interior urbanism is not an urbanism of the indoors, but an urbanism in which indoors and outdoors no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions in the city. In an interior urbanism, all space has equal potential to become part of a public or private sphere based on its occupation. The hierarchies that determine how space is occupied are not based on solids and voids (interiors as spaces hollowed out of objects or buildings as objects placed on a void) but rather by manipulation of atmosphere. The public and private spheres are defined by public and private ’spheres, or atmospheres.

Something in the air

Atmosphere fascinates architects because it creates an alternative to the narrative of building statics. Mark Wigley neatly explores these contradictions in his 1998 article, “The Architecture of Atmosphere.” Since the modern period, atmosphere has been portrayed as equal parts powerful and ephemeral, from Reyner Banham’s “well-tempered environment” to Sylvia Lavin’s “kiss” and Jeff Kipnis’s “blush.” Atmosphere has become equally alluring to studies of the origins of modern civic space in urbanism and political theory. Conceptual historian David Gissen references the works of architects Pierre Patte and Eugene Henard, engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, and civic planner Georges Haussmann, who “ensnared water, gas, trees, stone, and animal and human ablutions into a circulatory vision of an urban streetscape … designed to circulate both nature matter, ‘bourgeois’ concepts of leisure-nature, and state-capitalist notions of nature” in nineteenth-century Paris, and explores the role of environmental risk in shaping the interior environments of post-war Manhattan. German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has described the history of artificial atmosphere as beginning with the 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens, designed by Decimus Turner and engineered by Richard Burton. Heated by coal boilers in its basement that fed water pipes under iron gratings in the floor, the Palm House combined active and passive environmental management to sustain an environment suitable for the keeping of various species of exotic palms, which were being returned to Britain from colonial possessions. To Sloterdijk, the Palm House “marked a clear caesura in the history of building” by recognizing the inherent relationship between organisms and their atmosphere.

There was rich interest in the creation of atmosphere in the practice of both contemporary architecture at the turn of the millennium, much of which embodies both a pursuit of adaptive forms and spatial effects and a critique of static definitions of the public. Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London manipulated humidity, heat, and light to conflate the boundless experience of the exterior within the enclosed. An Te Liu’s 2008 Cloud at the 11th Venice Architecture Biennale is

an assembly of air purifiers, ionizers, washers, humidifiers, and ozone air cleaners running continuously. Mason White explained,

‘Cloud’ is read as a machined equivalent of an actual cloud abstracted into its components of moisture processing, air exchanges, and atmospheric densities and imagines the potential, as with snow-making machines, of generating entire weather conditions at will … its own bubble of processed air dissipating into the larger space, an invisible zone of purity shape-shifting with the interior microclimates.$^7$

Diller+Scoffidio described their 2002 Blur Building on Lake Neuchatel, Switzerland, more simply as “an architecture of atmosphere.”$^8$ Utilizing water as a building material, 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles emit fog generated from the water of the lake below. The Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover actualizes what Sloterdijk refers to as “an operational unit of the sprawling triad of space station, greenhouse, and Human Island.” He describes, “A hybrid form between botanic garden and large residence, this brilliantly bizarre building, a kind of vertical plant tower, offers a contemporary comment on an expanding definition of dwelling spaces of biotopic diversity under conditions of high urban density.”$^9$

A review of projects collected by Zoe Ryan for the 2006 exhibition The Good Life at the Van Alen Institute in New York reveals a particular fascination with the adaptability of atmosphere to structure the public realm outdoors. Rebar’s (PARK)ing (2005) converts San Francisco parking spaces into urban parks using sod and potted plants; Greyworld’s public art projects in the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany (1996–2005) convert street furniture and guard railings into musical instruments; Takano Landscape Planning Company’s Takachi Ecology Park in Obihiro City, Japan (2006), includes inflatable domes to simulate weightlessness and a “fog and water environment that changes constantly depending on the weather conditions”; temporary urban beaches convert highways to recreational spaces in Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Rome.$^{10,11}$

If atmosphere has the same implications on social order as space, then interiority is not a disciplinary or spatial distinction, but a theoretical framework for understanding social order. Hong Kong’s urbanism is a spectacular test of this application.

Politics of the public ’sphere Politics are practiced in the public ’sphere in Hong Kong in part because the city has so few traditional spaces of state power as understood in either the Eastern or the Western canon. Like so much else in Hong Kong, density exacerbates interiority.

Colonial Hong Kong was spread along the steep shores of Hong Kong Island. Land was so sparse that the British Navy’s headquarters was originally housed aboard a ship, the HMS Tamar, which docked at the foot of Victoria Peak. Through successive reclamation projects, the colony grew into the City of Victoria and began to build institutions and public spaces including City Hall and Royal Square, later known as Statue Square after the statue of Queen Victoria unveiled there in 1896. City Hall was replaced by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1933, and is presently the site of the HSBC Main Building, completed in 1985. On a perpendicular axis with Statue Square was the High Court Building, built in 1912 by Sir Aston Webb and Ingress Bell; the two-story neoclassical granite building features an ionic colonnade and dome surmounted by a replica of the statue of Themis atop Old Bailey in London. Vacated by the Court in 1980, in 1985 it became the home of the City’s Legislative Council (LegCo), the parliamentary body charged with city administration since 1843. Originally appointed, and later directly elected, LegCo continues to function under the Basic Law since the 1997 handover to China.

In 2011, LegCo vacated the High Court Building for a new complex on a parcel of land recently reclaimed from the harbor on a site named for the HMS Tamar. Where the older building had the trappings of a Western seat of government (dome, colonnade) as well as its provenance, the new complex resembles a suburban office park or a luxury hotel. Designed

by Hong Kong Architect Rocco Yim, the building is composed of two tower blocks bridged by a slightly skewed horizontal cap. The effect, described as a gateway by the architect and as representing the transparency of government by LegCo, is undermined by the thicket of towers immediately behind it and by its general surface opacity. These ambitions are better exemplified in its podium, or multistory base, which slopes toward the harbor with a widening lawn and connects via footbridges back over Harcourt Road to the city’s pedestrian network beyond it. The journey from LegCo through this network to Hong Kong Park, a formal garden on a terrace less than a kilometer away, is a walk up and down stairs and escalators, through the air conditioned atria of shopping mall interiors, the narrow corridors of tower block lobbies and arcades, and the liminal spaces of urban convenience, such as the catwalks beside public transit interchanges or parking garages. These are not spaces that are traditionally associated with the presence of the state or its overthrow. Comprising an interior urbanism, they are, however, potential spaces for political action. In a city in which formal urban spaces do not embody narratives, their occupation tends to do so instead.

The HSBC Main Building sits adjacent to one of the last remaining colonial public spaces in Hong Kong: Statue Square. Both the square and the building, with its open ground plan below suspended banking halls, are host on Sundays to foreign domestic workers gathering on their government-mandated day off. David Howes uses this space, and the larger weekend occupation of footbridges outside of shopping malls, as an example of the influence of atmosphere on the city’s public ’sphere. Referring to the work of urban ethnographer Lisa Law, he describes how the sounds and scents of the foreign workers, mostly Filipino, establish temporary cultural boundaries between their “Little Manila” and the financial center:

Figure 48.2 Massing. The continuous interiors of Hong Kong’s pedestrian network represented as a solid figure.

Drawing by Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon, and Clara Wong

This conflict within Hong Kong society over the sensuous (re)construction of space by the migrant workers during their leisure hours testifies to the politics of differing sensory strategies for making sense of the same place, and calls attention to the multicultural tensions embedded in the city’s urban fabric.12

In September 2011, activists who would form the Occupy Movement demonstrated against income inequality by encamping in Zucotti Park, a public space adjacent to Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Federal Reserve in Lower Manhattan. Not long afterwards, on October 15, protesters in Hong Kong opened an encampment on the plaza underneath the atrium of the HSBC Main Building, where they remained for

almost a year until they were forcibly cleared by court bailiffs on August 27, 2012. Like Zucotti Park, a privately owned public space (POPS) controlled by Brookfield Properties, the plaza under the HSBC building has a complex provenance. Owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway, a judge had ruled the occupation fell outside its intended use. Occupy Hong Kong outlasted the encampment in New York, as well as those in London and Frankfurt. Unlike these other protests, which occurred in sites adjacent to the space of global capital, Occupy Hong Kong overlapped the space of global capital and shared space with the informal occupation by foreign domestic workers that preceded it.

Following Chief Executive CY Leung’s adoption of a new primary school curriculum that included content seen by many as apologist for the Communist Party, fifty members of a student activist group called Scholarism occupied the public lawn beneath the LegCo complex. Beginning on August 30, 2012, the number of protesters would group to up to 120,000 by September 7, spilling out over the footbridges, access roads, and other interstitial urban spaces that surround the complex and voicing a message directed as much against the government’s unresponsiveness as against the curriculum itself. This protest, which dissipated after the government delayed implementation of the curriculum, presaged a longer, more tumultuous one. Beginning on September 28, 2014, with an attempt by student activists to scale fencing that blocked access to Civic Square (a public courtyard at the entrance to the headquarters) and resulting in turmoil, during which police fired tear gas into the gathering crowds, the so-called Umbrella Movement culminated in a sit-in by tens of thousands of Hong Kongers in Admiralty and other sites throughout the territory. Organized on the ground by numerous organizations, including the student movement Scholarism and the advocacy group Occupy Central with Love and Peace, the Umbrella Movement lacked clear central planning or coordination. Participants communicated directly by smartphone apps and responded to circumstances as they developed. Occupying footbridges and sidewalks, but also major roads, the movement engendered a temporary urbanism of barricades, stages, tents, and other informal structures that

included recycling and trash pickup, supply depots and delivery networks, phone charging stations, medical, religious, educational, and social programing, and more. The Hong Kong Police cleared Admiralty on December 11, 2014.

Figure 48.3 Anti-capitalism protestors encamped in the atrium beneath the HSBC Main Building in Hong Kong (2012)

Image credit: Adam Frampton

Unlike preceding political turmoil from Cairo to Kiev that centered on visible occupations of formal public spaces and streets, in Hong Kong, no street or square holds such a symbolic place at the center of the city’s public life. Rather, the city’s public sphere persists in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure. This is the territory of politics in Hong Kong.

Shifting winds

The public ’spheres of Hong Kong demonstrate a divergence between the “indoors” and the “interior.” As both a space of expertise and a professional practice, interiors have tended to nest within architecture. As a disciplinary framework in the Anthropocene, interiority is expansive and pervasive, and becomes a space within which both architecture and urbanism operate. A general condition applicable to all spaces of public and private life in which atmospheric quality determines occupation and sets the stage for politics, interiority is increasingly the governing paradigm for urbanism in fast-growing cities and privatized suburban campuses alike. Atmosphere itself may be neutral; it is wielded on both sides of Hong Kong’s economic and political divides. The clouds of teargas in Admiralty and the perfumed air of the adjacent Pacific Place shopping mall are both tools for reinforcing the hierarchies of Hong Kong’s political establishment, while the sounds and smells of Howes’s “Little Manila” or the expat bars of Lan Kwai Fong establish another within the city’s culture. While atmosphere may be neutral, the condition of interiority is not. Unlike traditional figure-ground hierarchies in which program and ownership are fixed to spatial configuration, interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft. Such an urbanism is at once more rich and more treacherous; more powerful and more volatile. In the architectural utopias imagined by postwar European modernists, the continuous interior was politically liberating and economically equalizing. In Hong Kong, these effects are difficult to find. The territory has the largest wealth inequality in the world and is dominated politically by Beijing. Yet winds shift: the Umbrella Movement spectacularly redrew boundaries that many assumed were stable, but smaller actions regularly achieve the same impacts at a more quotidian scale. Streets become hair salons or workshops, shopping malls host impromptu art classes or musical performances, walkways become restaurants or mahjong parlors. This is all possible because an interior urbanism allows a mutability of hierarchy on a changing wind.

Notes

1. Portions of this paper are adapted from Jonathan D. Solomon, “Public – Spheres: Atmosphere and Adaptable Space in Hong Kong”, in Masterplanning the Adaptive City, Computational Urbanism in the 21st Century, ed. Tom Verebes (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 68–74; and from Jonathan D. Solomon, “Ad Hoc Admiralty”, LEAP (31 January/February 2015): 54–67.

2. Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong, Cities Without Ground (San Francisco, CA: Oro Editions, 2012).

3. Mark Wigley, “The Architecture of Atmosphere”, Daidalos 68 (1998): 18–27.

4. Reyner Banham, Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969); Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Jeffrey Kipnis, “The Cunning of Cosmetics”, Herzog & de Meuron: El Croquis 84 (1997).

5. David Gissen, “APE”, in Design Ecologies: Essays on the Nature of Design, ed. Lisa Tilder and Beth Blostien (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), pp. 65–66.

6. Peter Sloterdijk, “Atmospheric Politics”, in Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture, ed. Michael Hensel, Christopher Hight, and Achim Menges (London: Wiley, 2009), pp. 173–174.

7. Mason White, “99.7 Per Cent Pure”, in New Material Boundaries, AD Architectural Design, 79, no. 3 (May/June), ed. Sean Lally (2009): 21–22.

8. “Diller Scofidio + Renfro”, http://dsrny.com/ (accessed 7 July 2012).

9. Peter Sloterdijk, “Foam City: About Urban Spatial Multitudes”, in New Geographies, 0 (2009): 136–143.

10. Zoe Ryan, The Good Life: New Public Spaces for Recreation (New York: The Van Alen Institute, 2006), p. 29, 31, 56, 61.

11. Peter Sloterdijk, “Spheres Theory: Talking to Myself About the Poetics of Space”, Harvard Design Magazine 30 (Spring/Summer 2009), pp. 126–137.

12. David Howes, “Architecture and the Senses”, in Sense of the City, ed. Mirko Zardini (Baden: Lars Mueller Publishers, 2005), pp. 326–327.

13. “Occupy Hong Kong Camp Cleared From HSBC Headquarters”, Associated Press in Hong Kong, 2012, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/11/occupy-hong-kong-camp-hsbc.

14. Shirley Zhao, “Record-High Turnout for Anti-National Education Protests”, Time Out, 8 September 2012, http://www.webcitation.org/6AVyS2c6x