Solomon, Jonathan D.

Bio Sketch

Jonathan D. Solomon is an American architect, writer, editor, and educator whose work explores public space and the contemporary city. He is Associate Dean at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, founding editor of 306090 books (since 2001), and co-author with Adam Frampton and Clara Wong of Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (Oro Editions, 2012) — the drawing-and-model atlas of Hong Kong's continuous pedestrian network whose concept the wiki's interior urbanism cluster extends. His design work includes Ooi Botos Gallery (a Hong Kong shophouse street-market gallery for contemporary Chinese photographic art); his research includes 13 Projects for the Sheridan Expressway (Pamphlet Architecture 26, 2004); his curatorial work includes Workshopping in the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2010). He has taught at the City College of New York and, as a Banham Fellow, at the University at Buffalo, and led the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong as Acting Head from 2009 to 2012 — the period of the Hong Kong urbanism this wiki's source note documents. He is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois and an AIA member (bio web-verified via ORO Editions, the publisher of Cities Without Ground; institutional details current to the publisher's 2012 author note).

Key Works

Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (2012) — with Adam Frampton and Clara Wong (Oro Editions); the chapter's source text: "Density obliterates figure-ground in the city, and in turn re-defines public-private spatial relationships"; "Hong Kong lacks any of the traditional figure-ground relationships that shape urban space: axis, edge, center, even fabric"; the networks' "microclimates of temperature, humidity, noise and smell" as "an entirely new form of urban spatial hierarchy" — with "the emergence of the shopping malls as spaces of civil society rather than of global capital — as grounds of resistance" (not yet ingested — see log)
"Public – Spheres: Atmosphere and Adaptable Space in Hong Kong" (2014) — in Tom Verebes ed., Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in the 21st Century (Routledge), pp. 68–74; the first version of the chapter's argument (adapted per the chapter's note 1)
"Ad Hoc Admiralty" (2015) — LEAP 31, January/February, pp. 54–67; the Umbrella Movement's Admiralty occupation documented at first hand (adapted per the chapter's note 1)
13 Projects for the Sheridan Expressway (2004) — Pamphlet Architecture 26; the research register on public space and urban infrastructure
"Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism" (2018) — Ch. 48 of The Interior Architecture Reader — *Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism* (2018) — the chapter that gives the wiki its atmospheric redefinition of interior urbanism, its public 'spheres, and the occupation register of figure-ground's absence

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

interior-urbanism — the concept Solomon redefines: "not an urbanism of the indoors, but an urbanism in which indoors and outdoors no longer codify meaningful political or cultural distinctions"
interiority — his promotion of the interior from disciplinary condition to "a theoretical framework for understanding social order"
atmosphere — the medium of occupation: public and private "spheres, or atmospheres"
atmospheric-politics — atmosphere "wielded on both sides of Hong Kong's economic and political divides"
public-sphere — the Habermasian term rewritten as public 'spheres
figure-ground — the order Hong Kong's urbanism lacks, and inverts in the Cities Without Ground massings
privatised-public-space — the POPS condition of the HSBC plaza
smellscape — "prodigious scents" as cultural boundary
microevent-microenvironment — the pub microclimate
everyday-architecture — the quotidian mutability: "streets become hair salons or workshops"

Relevance to the Core Research

Solomon's chapter is the wiki's decisive corrective to the interior-urbanism concept as inherited from Marinic's Portman chapter: where Portman's atria internalize the city into privatized commercial interiors, Hong Kong's continuous interior is a public resource whose political threshold is atmospheric rather than architectonic — "all space has equal potential to become part of a public or private sphere based on its occupation." This connects the interior cluster to the power-and-space debate at its most literal (teargas vs perfume as two administrations of air) and gives the wiki's everyday-life cluster its political-urban register: politics persisting "in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure." His Cities Without Ground — co-authored during his HKU headship — is the most cited unpublished source in the cluster and a candidate for a future ingest (see log). For the Researcher's performance-model and production-oriented interests, the chapter's atmospheric hierarchy (who owns the air) is the political pendant to Odom's atmosphere-as-output: both make atmosphere the designed medium, but Solomon asks who it excludes.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism (2018) — Ch. 48 of Marinic's Reader; the atmospheric interior urbanism and the Hong Kong occupations