Public spheres: Hong Kong's interior urbanism

Author: Jonathan D. Solomon Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 48 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge) Raw file: raw/chapters/solomon-2018-public-spheres-hong-kong.md

Summary

Solomon's chapter argues that Hong Kong's density, topography, and economy produce an urbanism without figure-ground order — "there is no axis, edge, or center" — whose multilevel pedestrian networks of malls, transit terminals, and lobbies create "an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors.'" The chapter's core redefinition: "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" — hierarchies of occupation are set not by solids and voids but by "manipulation of atmosphere," so that "the public and private spheres are defined by public and private 'spheres, or atmospheres." The politics of Hong Kong — the domestic workers' Sunday occupation of Statue Square and the HSBC atrium, Occupy Hong Kong's eleven-month camp (2011–12), the Scholarism protests (2012), and the Umbrella Movement (2014) — is then read as the test of the concept: a city whose public sphere persists "in small-scale, ad hoc actions, appropriations, and occupations of private, public, and semi-public infrastructure," where "interior urbanism can make public life easier to snuff out, but at the same time allows it to waft." The chapter is adapted from Solomon's "Public – Spheres: Atmosphere and Adaptable Space in Hong Kong" (in Verebes ed., Masterplanning the Adaptive City, 2014) and his "Ad Hoc Admiralty" (LEAP, 2015), and builds on Frampton, Solomon & Wong's Cities Without Ground (2012).

Key Claims

The no-ground thesis: Hong Kong "create[s] 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" (figure-ground, citing Frampton, Solomon & Wong's Cities Without Ground, 2012).
The continuous-interior thesis: "The pedestrian networks stretching for kilometers across Hong Kong create an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors'" (interior-urbanism, interiority).
The manufactured outdoors: "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" (ambient-conditioning, atmosphere).
Sensory stratification: "Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another" — 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"; "varying access to natural light affects retail rents at the Landmark Mall"; the expat pubs of Lan Kwai Fong form "a microclimate distinct from the local street market just a block away" (smellscape, microevent-microenvironment, boundaries).
The chapter's central definition: "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" (interior-urbanism, public-sphere).
The atmospheric-hierarchy thesis: "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" — the apostrophe marking 'sphere' as a sphere of air (atmospheric-politics).
Atmosphere's architectural genealogy: "Atmosphere fascinates architects because it creates an alternative to the narrative of building statics" — Wigley's "The Architecture of Atmosphere" (1998); "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, banham-reyner).
The civic-atmospheric prehistory: conceptual historian David Gissen on nineteenth-century Paris — architects Pierre Patte and Eugène Hénard, engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand, and civic planner Georges Haussmann "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" (haussmann-baron, atmospheric-politics).
Sloterdijk's caesura: the history of artificial atmosphere "beginning with the 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens" — heated by coal boilers feeding water pipes under iron gratings, "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"; for Sloterdijk it "marked a clear caesura in the history of building" by "recognizing the inherent relationship between organisms and their atmosphere" (atmospheric-politics, ambient-conditioning). (The text names the designers "Decimus Turner" and "Richard Burton" — historically Decimus Burton and Richard Turner; see Open Questions.)
The atmospheric artwork genealogy: Eliasson's Weather Project (Tate Modern, 2003) "manipulated humidity, heat, and light to conflate the boundless experience of the exterior within the enclosed"; An Te Liu's Cloud (Venice Biennale, 2008) assembled "air purifiers, ionizers, washers, humidifiers, and ozone air cleaners running continuously" — Mason White: "'Cloud' is read as a machined equivalent of an actual cloud… and imagines the potential, as with snow-making machines, of generating entire weather conditions at will"; Diller Scofidio + Renfro's Blur Building (2002) described as "an architecture of atmosphere," with "31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles emit[ting] fog generated from the water of the lake below" — "Utilizing water as a building material" (installation, ambient-conditioning).
The public-realm atmosphere program (Van Alen Institute's The Good Life, 2006): Rebar's PARK(ing) (2005) "converts San Francisco parking spaces into urban parks using sod and potted plants"; Greyworld's street furniture "convert[ed]… into musical instruments"; Takano's Takachi Ecology Park's "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" — "a particular fascination with the adaptability of atmosphere to structure the public realm outdoors."
The theoretical promotion of interiority: "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" (interiority).
The political-sparse city: "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" (public-sphere, interior-urbanism).
The colonial sequence of Hong Kong's scarce civic spaces: land so sparse "that the British Navy's headquarters was originally housed aboard a ship, the HMS Tamar"; City Hall replaced by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank in 1933; the site now the HSBC Main Building (1985); the neoclassical High Court Building (1912, Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, Themis atop the dome) became LegCo's home in 1985; in 2011 LegCo moved to a new Tamar complex by Rocco Yim that "resembles a suburban office park or a luxury hotel" — its gateway/transparency ambition "undermined by the thicket of towers immediately behind it and by its general surface opacity."
The pedestrian-route-as-political-theatre: the journey from LegCo to Hong Kong Park runs "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" (interior-urbanism, power-and-space).
Occupation as narrative: "In a city in which formal urban spaces do not embody narratives, their occupation tends to do so instead" (practiced-place, public-sphere).
The Sunday occupation: Statue Square and the HSBC Main Building — "with its open ground plan below suspended banking halls" — host "foreign domestic workers gathering on their government-mandated day off"; via urban ethnographer Lisa Law, David Howes reads how "the sounds and scents of the foreign workers, mostly Filipino, establish temporary cultural boundaries between their 'Little Manila' and the financial center": "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" (smellscape, boundaries, heterosmia).
Occupy Hong Kong (October 15, 2011 – August 27, 2012): "protesters in Hong Kong opened an encampment on the plaza underneath the atrium of the HSBC Main Building… almost a year until they were forcibly cleared by court bailiffs"; the plaza is a POPS variant — "Owned by the bank but legally designated a public passageway, a judge had ruled the occupation fell outside its intended use." Unlike Zuccotti Park (a "privately owned public space (POPS) controlled by Brookfield Properties"), "Occupy Hong Kong overlapped the space of global capital and shared space with the informal occupation by foreign domestic workers that preceded it" — and "outlasted the encampment in New York, as well as those in London and Frankfurt" (privatised-public-space, atrium-hotel).
Scholarism and the LegCo lawn (August 30 – September 7, 2012): fifty student activists occupied "the public lawn beneath the LegCo complex," swelling to "120,000 by September 7, spilling out over the footbridges, access roads, and other interstitial urban spaces" — directed "as much against the government's unresponsiveness as against the curriculum itself."
The Umbrella Movement (September 28 – December 11, 2014): triggered by the attempt "to scale fencing that blocked access to Civic Square (a public courtyard at the entrance to the headquarters)" and the police firing "tear gas into the gathering crowds"; it "culminated in a sit-in by tens of thousands of Hong Kongers in Admiralty and other sites throughout the territory"; "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."
The no-square thesis: "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" (public-sphere, privatised-public-space).
The Anthropocenic promotion of interiority: "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" (interiority, interior-urbanism).
Atmosphere neutral, interiority not: "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" (atmospheric-politics).
The volatility thesis: "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" (interior-urbanism).
The failed-utopia contrast: "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" (interior-urbanism, atmospheric-politics).
The quotidian mutability terminus: "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" (everyday-architecture, change-of-use, interior-urbanism).

Connections

Concepts: interior-urbanism (the chapter's central concept, redefined as atmosphere-structured rather than indoors-coded), interiority (promoted from disciplinary quality to "a theoretical framework for understanding social order"), atmosphere (the medium of occupation and power), atmospheric-politics (atmosphere wielded on both sides of the divide), public-sphere (the Habermasian term rewritten as public 'spheres of air), figure-ground (the order the chapter removes and inverts as solid), privatised-public-space (POPS: Zuccotti Park and the HSBC plaza), non-places (the mall-transit walkway continuum Solomon politicizes), smellscape and olfaction and heterosmia (the "prodigious scents" stratifying Central), microevent-microenvironment (the pub microclimate), ambient-conditioning (the manufactured outdoors), boundaries (sensory cultural boundaries), practiced-place (occupation as narrative), everyday-architecture (quotidian-scale mutability), change-of-use (streets as salons, walkways as parlors), atrium-hotel (the HSBC atrium as political plaza), hostile-architecture (teargas as atmosphere control), inside-outside-dialectic (the divergence of indoors and interior), power-and-space (the debate the chapter extends), commons (the wafting public life), separate-spheres (the nineteenth-century sphere distinction the chapter's 'spheres rewrite).

Authors: Jonathan D. Solomon (the chapter's author), Gregory Marinic (the Reader's editor), Reyner Banham (the "well-tempered environment"), Georges Haussmann (the circulatory Paris), Jürgen Habermas (the public sphere the chapter's apostrophe reworks), Peter Sloterdijk (not yet paged — see log); cited figures without pages: Mark Wigley, David Gissen, Sylvia Lavin, Jeff Kipnis, David Howes, Lisa Law, Adam Frampton, Clara Wong, Mason White, An Te Liu, Olafur Eliasson, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Zoe Ryan, Rocco Yim (see log).

Debates: power-and-space — the chapter supplies the debate's atmospheric position: power operating as manipulated air rather than walls, sensors, or watchers (atmospheric-politics).

Related source notes: Internal disconnect (Marinic 2018) — interior urbanism's Portman founding account; Thick Edge (Borden 1996/2006) — the enclave's public/private blur and Broadgate's corporate interiority; Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the non-place control apparatus Solomon's pedestrian networks politicize; Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the interior's political register and the right-to-design claim; Metropolitan hybrids (Luna 2018) — the programming response to the same interiorized metropolis; Volatile Architectures (Drobnick 2002/2006) — the olfactory architecture the "prodigious scents" instantiate; Productions (Odom 2018) — atmosphere as design output vs Solomon's atmosphere as political medium; Architectural Atmospheres (Borch ed. 2006) — the experience-and-politics frame the chapter extends.

Direct Quotes

"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."

"The pedestrian networks stretching for kilometers across Hong Kong create an urbanism of continuous 'interiority' that does not always correlate to the 'indoors.'"

"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."

"Cooled, dehumidified, perfumed air distinguishes cultural and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one another."

"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"

"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."

"Atmosphere fascinates architects because it creates an alternative to the narrative of building statics."

"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.'"

[Gissen, quoted] "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"

[Sloterdijk, quoted] "marked a clear caesura in the history of building" — the 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens "recognizing the inherent relationship between organisms and their atmosphere."

[Mason White, quoted] "'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."

[Sloterdijk, quoted on the Dutch Pavilion] "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."

"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 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."

"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."

[Howes, quoted] "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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

Open Questions

The figure-ground inversion in Figure 48.2 ("The continuous interiors of Hong Kong's pedestrian network represented as a solid figure") suggests a representational programme — massing as inverse: the interior network as solid, the outdoor remainder as void. What would a full drawing grammar of atmospheric figure-ground look like (temperature, humidity, smell plumes as field rather than plan)?
The text names the Kew Palm House designers "Decimus Turner" and "Richard Burton" — historically Decimus Burton (architect) and Richard Turner (engineer). Does the slip matter for Sloterdijk's caesura claim, or is it a routing error in the Reader? (Not corrected in the wiki; both names reported as printed.)
Is the apostrophe in "public 'sphere" (also "public 'spheres") a typographic error for a quoted 'sphere', or Solomon's deliberate device marking the sphere as atmospheric rather than Habermasian? The chapter never explains it — the wiki carries the ambiguity (public-sphere).
Can the "mutability of hierarchy on a changing wind" be designed for deliberately, or only exploited tactically after the fact? The chapter documents occupations that used the network; it does not name a practice that designs it (interior-urbanism, production-oriented-practices).
Does the chapter's "public 'sphere" survive clearance? Occupy Hong Kong outlasted Zuccotti "as well as those in London and Frankfurt" — but Admiralty was cleared. Is wafting a form of persistence or its own dispersal?
What is the status of the domestic-workers' Sunday occupation in the concept: is "Little Manila" the interior urbanism's founding example (sensory occupation without any protest event) or a counter-case (a boundary the workers establish against the network's own stratification)?
The modernist continuous interior is judged against its utopian promise ("politically liberating and economically equalizing… difficult to find") — but is the comparison fair to the modernists' own scale, or does Hong Kong simply extend the same program past its social threshold?