Inverted Hong Kong

Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism

서울도시건축

비엔날레

Inverted Hong Kong

반 전 의 홍 콩

to the

Behind the legitimate city, of which we can easily draw the outlines, lies the city of ‘in-betweens’ – a city in a constant state of transformation, but which inspires precisely because it has not been finished or defined ; a city that leaves room for the imagining of a future or a past. At a macro-scale, morphological ‘in-betweens’ are identified as industrial wastelands, infrastructure surroundings, vacant plots, waste grounds ; so-called ‘urban diseases’ resulting from deindustrialization or territorial fragmentation pushed by economic agendas. At a micro-scale, they are small gaps and recesses within the dense urban areas, resulting from the built environment’s mutation process.

For users, these areas in transition, abandoned, offer a momentary space which they can appropriate. Motivated more by pragmatism than sentimentalism or nostalgia, people find in these liminal places a space that answers a need. Activities taking place in these vacant lands are more or less legal, but often temporary. In fact, like concomitant vases, the intensity of the appropriation of voids is tightly linked to the extent of the repression felt in the built, the planned, and the official surrounding them. Yet, devoid of systematic functions, programs, and rules, ‘in-betweens’ bring a feeling of liberation. We feel free to interpret them.

Hong Kong

Donuimun Museum Village Site Plan

Inverted Hong Kong was a site-specific installation set up in the Donuimun Museum Village, and part of the ‘Cities Exhibition’ during the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019. The audience was engaged and challenged by a representation of a city as a system of thresholds where the domestic and the collective overlap. Perceived as an opportunity to test out spatial ideas, the social, cultural and legal parameters are put aside. Considering only the spatial configuration, the installation speculates on the shifting boundaries between inside and outside through the re-articulating of the existing.

Occupying a fragment of void, a house is growing within an open air corridor. This grey render container is articulated by sheets of woods, framing fragments of Hong Kong’s textures. Too big to be furniture, too small to be shelter, the spatial units are not filling up a gap but inhabiting a threshold. Interlocking space without physical connection, the house fragments support intimate rituals of daily life. Three cups of makoli transform a window frame into a cheering place; a bathtub is inserted into a staircase, using the altitude to overcome proximity; and a wrapped blanket indicates a place to rest. Taking revenge against the overwhelming urban forces, the installation does not reflect the urge to find shelter, but the desire to domesticate the city.

This work reflects what I see that the Asian city is, what it can be, and what can then be added into it, contributing to providing an original approach to reading and writing the built environment. From my observations and my readings of the city, I have derived a set of values, qualities, or characteristics that I then transpose or use to inform action in the form of architectural and urban projects. How I read the city (and so then write back into the city) reflects my attitude to architecture as well as reflecting what I value in the Asian city and what I have come to value architecturally.

of

a Journey

During the last decade, the focus of my research has been on understanding the development mechanisms of Asian cities through the lenses of urban voids. Instead of looking at built forms, I have studied the residual buffer zones and non-planned spaces within three different urban contexts of Hong Kong. These peculiar qualities powered my curiosity and led me to develop some spatial interventions – respectively the STAG project, Wut Tung Sat and Peng Chau Inside-Out – as agents to enquire into and navigate the in-betweens.

Hong Kong Back Lanes

Hong Kong, 2009—2015

In-betweens in Hong Kong are narrow back lanes that form a network of interstitial spaces in the dense urban morphology. These narrow service lanes are not registered on official maps, as they are more open air corridor cutting through private land than registered streets; however, put together, this network of semi-private but publicly accessible streets represent an area of 150 km. This is four times the area of the recently reclaimed land that makes up the West Kowloon Cultural District, the upcoming trendy public space of the city.

Although tiny in size, the recurrence of the service lane typology in many urban areas of Hong Kong has a strong impact on the way we perceive and experience the city. Less regulated and sterile than official public spaces (where one is welcomed by a long list of interdictions), these residual spaces – unplanned and appropriated by their inhabitants – function as important buffer zones across the city. When lack of space is an issue, these morphological in-betweens collect the overflow of life.

Inherent in the in-between condition is the ambiguity of ownership. In Hong Kong’s back lanes, private activities overlap with public ground. A second-hand couch, potted plants, a mirror on a wall, or T-shirts on a hanger, are indicators of a whole living system. Making the most out of the ambiguity of ownership, the network appears as a giant urban living room, configured to react to instant needs. Compared to over-regulated official public spaces, it offers a place for all kinds of activities that would not be allowed in more official locations. Also, because the spaces are not saturated with function, there is room for appropriation. Within this territory of unwritten rules, the users and the passers-by are shifting the lines of their personal boundaries. Its forms are in constant negotiation between different users. Overprogramming and regulations upon public spaces mirror the authorities’ need to control and to eliminate any non-definite qualities

in spaces. Here, the lack of clarity of ownership and usage seems to call for consensus among users.

From these observations, one can start to understand the connections between the different programs and realise that in such a dense and oppressive city, the types of interactions observed in these lanes were similar to those that could be expected in a small village.

When public and private overlaps, users are able to maintain an intimate relationship with space while sharing it with others. In fact, if users are not considered as a mass of people but as a sum of individuals, they tend to reactivate their human skills. Far from being a menace, this sense of personal freedom and belonging in a dense city is also encouraging social coherence and stability. Who would destroy their own living room ?

The Stag Project Hong Kong, 2012

The STAG project, which included the design of a portable stool combined with a backpack, emerged as a type of experimentation with these ambiguities of time and ownership. To further enquire into the ambiguous aspect of the law, the project was initiated as a strategy to swap the role of observer for that of actor. The stool became a tool to reveal the unwritten rules. By organising events (a tea ceremony, open-air cinema, DJ party) in the interstices, temporary occupation led to negotiations with the neighbours and, occasionally, with the police, both scenarios prompting a recognition of the legitimacy of semi-private uses on semi-public ground. This led me to reflect on the way we think and design spatial boundaries. Instead of forcing the polarities between public and private space, indoor and outdoor, can we design spaces that provide multiple ways of interpretations ? Thanks to the ambiguous status of those spaces, more intuitive form of usage was able to emerge.

Duckling Hill

Hong Kong, 2012—2016

This reflection on the momentary personal appropriation of open-air areas of the city led me to seek other types of ambiguous situations. It led me to a group of elderly people who, acting at another scale, on another territory, were engaged in a similar, subtle negotiation for domestication. At the edge of Hong Kong’s urban territory, the green slopes of Duckling Hill (鴨仔山) offer a natural buffer zone in which to escape from the standardised new town of Tseung Kwan O (將軍澳). Over the years, the local residents have gradually appropriated the hill and turned these slopes into their own public space. To facilitate access and enable a wide range of activities, they have, with great care, built a light infrastructure of stairs, resting spaces, flower gardens, DIY benches, pavilions and rubbish bins. Here again, the public and private overlap. Behind the manicured flower garden or set of brooms hanging next to a polished area clear of all leaves, we can sense a strong feeling of home, and the intimate relationship hikers have with the hill. Compared to the formulaic response of Government facilities and their blindness to the qualities of the site, the eldery users’ innate knowledge of the place’s ecology puts them ahead of any team of experts. The oscillation of the territorial ownership led to the juxtaposition of two universes: the pragmatic and engineered places set up by the Government on a large scale; and the poetic and home related small-scale interventions by the Tseung Kwan O inhabitants.

In their negotiation process with the authorities, the gang of elders resorted to using us, architects and University students, to convey their concerns. I saw my role shifting from researcher and designer to an agent in-between the negotiating parties. Rather than responding to their proposal to design a pavilion, we created a publication in the form of a newspaper The People of Duckling Hill that voiced every party’s view on the hill’s case.

Peng Chau Island 2016—2019

Moving away from the dense Hong Kong island, I settled down on the island of Peng Chau, curious to look at the city from another perspective. Although tiny in size (just one square km), the island holds a series of very seperate universes, including a deep jungle, two hills, some agriculture plots and a densely built village area. In many ways, the island is like a miniaturised Hong Kong as it could have been 150 years ago ; no cars and building heights limited to three floors.

Once again, this investigation started from a hunch. I perceived the island as a giant living room. Unlike Hong Kong Island’s back lanes, the overflow of daily life is not collected in the interstitial gaps between two towers, but instead expands outwards from the ground floor facade. In terms of spatial organisation, the presence of potted plants, chairs and other personal items are used to expand the limits of the tangible facade. These domestic items laid over the public areas expand the intangible boundaries of privacy.

When a person trespasses over the official limits of their personal space, an accurate sense of awareness of the surrounding is automatically developed. Here again the question is not ‘is it legal or not’ but ‘how ?’. In most cases, the negotiation with the neighbouring context is not formulated into words, but deducted from a tacit understanding of what can be done and how. This fragile equilibrium requires the establishment of a more intimate relationship with the place, which is reflected in the intimate and interiorised atmosphere of the island.

Wut Tung Sat Hong Kong, 2017–2019

The Wut Tung Sat, a small ground floor unit located within the village of Peng Chau, was set up as a laboratory to reflect on this question through the transformation of a space as a threshold. Working with small 1:1 interventions, instead of appropriating the whole site, I tested the possibilities of shifting intangible boundaries within a spatial project. One after the other, together with some local craftsmen we built a series of spatial components as a way to articulate the existing space.

Mini spaces within the space, conceived as giant furniture, emphasise the domestic and intimate territory on one hand, while reinforcing the public character of the shop or ‘activity room’ on the other hand. As the space’s functions evolved, in an attempt to play with the boundary between the common and the intimate, the mini-house became a sleeping unit. An expanded window frame became a bar counter, literally a threshold or liaison, bridging introverted and extraverted activities. These allowed the articulation of the existing site through spatial components at various scales, letting the impression of vastness expand, without increasing the actual footprint of the area. Interlocking spaces were a key to establishing new relationships between the inside and outside.

Peng Chau Inside-Out 2018

Aiming to further push the transgression of boundaries, the installation Peng Chau InsideOut explored the juxtaposition of the intimacy of bathing within a residual outdoor space. When transforming the Wut Tung Sat space into a mini living infrastructure, I favoured the use of the large, comfortable and clean public bathroom located 100 meters away from the shop in the sport centre instead of cramping every function within the limits of interior space. The perceived limits of the space suddenly expanded beyond the physical perimeter of the project’s location. The boundary between public and private shifted; what is usually conceived as a very private activity (cleaning oneself) was moved into a public space. In this case I used the program as the means to allow temporary expansion of the space at different times. In Peng Chau Inside-Out, the bathing activities expand beyond the legal boundaries of the Wut Tung Sat to a tinny back lanes, few meters away. By hiding a bathroom in a corner of the island, I drastically increased the metaphorical territory for the project: potentially the whole island could be appropriated as a home.

Closing the loop and pinning up the 1:1 scale image of the installation on the wall of Wut Tung Sat, added another layer to the juxtaposition of universes: the intimate, the common, the outdoor, the indoor, the public and the private, expanding and retracting parallel universes.

These few projects summaries my journey through Hong Kong’s liminal spaces. Along the way, the shift from in-situ observation and intervention to the making of architecture has challenged my understanding of what the city is. Instead of an accumulation of solid and void, I started to envision the city as a system of thresholds that oscillate between the classical duo of public/private, legal/illegal, inside/outside. Shifting site from Hong Kong to Seoul, I was interested to transfer some to that knowledge through the generation of a spatial project.

Dr. Géraldine Borio is a Swiss registered architect and the founder of Borio Lab an independent research laboratory and architecturalbased practice. She is currently an assistant professor at The University of Hong Kong, Department of Architecture.

Géraldine Borio is the co-author of the books Hong Kong In-Between (Park Books & MCCM Creations, 2015) and The People of Duckling Hill (HK Poly U, 2016).

Inverted Hong Kong

by Géraldine Borio

Assistants : David Grünig, Katherine Wu, Wesley She

Photography : Nils Clauss

Copy Editor : Cathy Coote

Design : Bureau Mondial

Font : Walter by Omnitype

Projects Reference

STAG

by Géraldine Borio with Caroline Wüthrich, Hong Kong, 2012.

活動室 Wut Tung Sat by Géraldine Borio with Jae Hyun Lim, Hong Kong, 2017–2019.

Peng Chau Inside-Out by Géraldine Borio with Myriem Alnet, Hong Kong, 2018.

Bibliography

Hong Kong In-Between

Borio, G, Wüthrich, C, Hong Kong In-Between, Bilingual edition, MCCM Creations, Hong Kong & Park Books, Zürich, 2015.

The People of Duckling Hill

Borio, G, Wüthrich, C, The People of Duckling Hill, Parallel Lab & The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, 2016.

Géraldine Borio would like to warmly thank the curators Dongwoo Yim and Rafael Luna, the assistant curator Kim Youbeen as well as the coordinator Cho Tony Woonghee and the rest of the ‘Cities Exhibition’s team. She would like to express her gratitude to the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Representing Hong Kong at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019, Géraldine Borio examined the theme of ‘The Collective’ through the lens of her research on the city’s liminal spaces.

Hong Kong’s interstitial network of back lanes within the city’s dense urban fabric are ambiguous buffer zones, which oscillate between the classical binary opposition of public/private, legal / illegal, inside / outside. Not planned as such, they are not assigned to particular functions or programs, and are often ignored by the city’s officials. However, these in-between territories are open to multiple interpretations and offer a momentary space for the city’s inhabitants to appropriate.

Inverted Hong Kong is a site-specific installation that speculates on the shifting boundaries between inside and outside. The audience is engaged and challenged by a representation of a city as a system of thresholds where the domestic and the collective overlap.