Michael Headrick 2011584087 The University of Hong Kong Department of Architecture Year Two Architecture Studio (Fall Semester 2012)
Project 1
Hong Kong is a dynamic city, with an ever-changing landscape of urban fabrics that are constantly being changed and edited by the residents of the city. Canton Road is a prime example of this citizen-motivated landscape. It’s history, the current use of the space, and the ways that the space affects the rest of the city illuminates the very dynamic and ever changing nature of this city. Canton Road has gone through a number of changes as a location and as a street market, it was built with the shoreline in mind, but had to react to reclamation and eventually widespread development in the late 20th and early 21st century. The road’s current state as a street market, and the completely organic organization of it, gives power of it’s existence and identity to the citizens alone, who are the fuel for the market program found on the site. Lastly, Canton Road provides much for the local residents and also is a marker that changes the makeup of the neighborhood and is in a way a guardian of the historic tenement houses from widespread development that is currently happening in the Mongkok area. The urban landscape of Hong Kong is both dynamic through time and also very dynamic through space, as can be seen through one of many examples: Canton Road.
The dynamic nature of Hong Kong can be seen through the lenses of history, as development changed the city and created a rich fabric of layers of changes and architectural interventions over the past hundred years. In the mid 1800s, Hong Kong started to develop quite rapidly because of the new colonial settlers from England who started to use the port city as a central trading center for Asia. Canton Road is one such space in which the impact of these historical events can be seen architecturally. “Originally, (the area) provided dockside, marine supplies and small vessels repair services, agglomerating at Ferry Street and Canton Road” . What was once a shipyard, a major dock for the exchange of goods, loading and unloading of trading ships called for local vendors and suppliers
for such trade, this was the start of what is now known as the Canton Road market. The tenement housing built in the area followed a contemporary trend of worker housing in close proximity to the work district. This trend came to be mainly because of the lack and inefficiency of public transportation at the time, people needed to be closer to the places that they worked to minimize travel time. The combination of the this need for housing and also the vendors that sprung up close to the docks created Canton Road, a market area with economic housing for the workforce.
As reclamation began around Hong Kong, Canton Road once again faced an agent of change. The reclamation took over western Kowloon and brought the shoreline much further away from Canton Road and the immediate need for such markets, vendors, and even the housing was no longer present. However, this did not change Canton Road, it arguably kept Canton Road the same. If the shoreline had stayed near the road market, it would have surely been redeveloped for the newer shipyard technology and large-scale container storage areas. Another factor that kept the area vibrantly alive was the development of public transportation; now the residents of the area did not need to be so close to the places that they worked. The biggest change to the area was probably the type of market that Canton Road had become. No longer was it catering to the shipyards to the immediate west, but it became a market for the local residents of Canton Road. “Market and hand tools/machinery retail business at Canton Road are still maintained” . This can still be seen today, as Canton Road is primarily a vegetable and produce market with other household goods. As the market became a place that primarily served the residents of the area, we begin to see the very democratic way that the market is now affected. Canton Road, not a planned architectural space,
is an interesting architectural phenomenon in which a road originally constructed for vehicles has been taken over and ‘reclaimed’ for pedestrian and commercial use. Even more interestingly, the space has been restructured in a very organic and unplanned way. The road was not constructed with the desire of solely pedestrian traffic; however the age of the site, which predates heavy automobile traffic, takes on similar qualities of the Tsim Sha Tsui road systems in which, “the access road network was for internal circulation and essential traffic…(and) roads were made narrow… (providing) a physical deterrent to through traffic” . Unlike TST, this area does not include a zoned pedestrian street; however, the Canton Road market has taken an almost parasitic role in blocking the way of any vehicular traffic. The market stalls that populate the two-lane road overflow all the way into the middle of the street, leaving only a corridor for pedestrian traffic among the slew of vegetables, fish and canvas bags. This organic force that has taken over the streets depicts the adaptive nature of Hong Kong: in the ebb and flow of the citizens in the city, there is a ebb and flow that transforms a space or area. Canton Road is a special case in which this unique trait of Hong Kong shines through, the auto-pedestrianization of certain areas based not on urban plans but based on the dweller’s desires or needs. Contrastingly to Hong Kong, “In Europe, it is generally combined with traffic control and conservation of the urban fabric, while in the U.S.A. it is more related to economic revitalization of downtown economy in general” . Because of the building typologies around Canton Road, tenement housing, people are forced to go out onto the streets and utilize the public space instead of spending their time indoors. Another factor is the instantiation of these vendor stalls or lockers that are able to compact into very small spaces at night, but then during the day can be expanded into fully functioning market stalls. During the night the space seems to go to sleep with its users. This pedestrianization is not one motivated by revitalization, conservation, or reviving an economy; instead, it is motivated out of the needs and lives of local residents. This formation of an architectural space by the forces of residents, and not urban planners or government agencies, is reminiscent of 18th century European and American cities, which struggled to develop as they came against this very organic development that took over many cities. Considering the young age of Hong Kong, we can expect the same struggles and
issues to surface, as spaces are re-evaluated for development. Solutions for the urban landscape have come in a few ways, two of which are reclamation, seen to the west of Canton Road, and Haussmannization, seen to the east of Canton Road. Canton Road in itself is a seemingly forgotten remnant of the past, with Langham Place on its east side and Olympic station on the west. It is a product of past urban development that has since been done away with. Interestingly, the tenement housing that surrounds the road market is also a factor in the development of the architectural space, and the typology maintains the current state of the market. In many ways, Canton Road is a condition that points back to certain architectural decisions and actions, such as the tenement housing and reclamation. But also, the space has been for the most part forgotten amidst the rapid conscious re-development, and retains that pure and very organic architectural impact of this unplanned and unexpected experience.
The current existence of Canton Road is an interesting one, a simple questions invokes a very different future for the area: what would happen to the market if the area’s environment would be altered considerably? As stated earlier, the tenement housing surrounding Canton Road has proved to be a major player in the market’s history and current existence. One major criticism of the typology, however, is the lack of
amenities and modern facilities in such a building. In addition, most of the tenement houses in the area are populated by what has been named ‘cage houses’, small one-person cubicle living spaces. Because of this housing situation, the market provides spacial relief for such inhabitants. The destruction of such buildings would almost guarantee the destruction of this dependent market space, as can be seen in various blocks in the same district of MongKok such as Langham Place and Langham Hotel. The very Haussmann approach to the Canton Road area in future development would surely kill the vibrant life that currently thrives there. This characteristic struggle of Hong Kong is being played out in the site, as on one side there is the consideration of health and quality of life that contrasts with the ideas of culture and conservation. Currently Canton Road balances on the line of value in either its usefulness versus the site’s historical significance and development. Canton Road very soon will most definitely face the hurtle of redevelopment or rezoning. The question would be how to make an intervention with the respect of historical development and also the utility and functionality for the dweller of the site? Any planner or architect will come to a situation with a prior knowledge or opinion about the solution to this problem; therefore, a question to consider may be, “Should people be allowed to participate? What then is citizen participation?” . Democracy, Planning and Citizen Participation suggests that a city, and Hong Kong specifically, needs “a process of input from non-formal sources of power into the formal decision-making structure…In other words, they [non-formal sources] are people without legal rights to make decisions,” who must be heard throughout the planning process of a city . This has in many ways been the case in Canton Road for the past hundred years: the “non-formal sources of power” have taken their own initiative to shape the city around them and have developed what is now known as Canton Road. However, organized development is inevitable and the author in Democracy, Planning and Citizen Participation warns, “(although) this collaborative planning can be described as a process in which there is a genuine interaction between citizens and planners. Participation is … a two-edged sword: planners must be open to working with citizens and citizens must be active and competent in planning” . The next step for Canton Road must be contingent on the residents and his or her desire for development, rather than a top down urban intervention that de-
stroys the past development of the urban fabric. The history, the impact on the city, and the current use of Canton Road all point to the overarching trends seen in the site and all over Hong Kong. Instead of being changed by one singular urban plan or intervention, the site reacts to smaller but arguably more dynamic decisions made by very different factors. This exposes the urban landscape of Hong Kong: one that cannot be seen only in view of the original Chinese residents, the western settlers, economy, or sociological forces. Instead, Hong Kong (as seen through the example of Canton Road), becomes an amalgamation of in numerous forces from the historic decisions of land reclamation and tenement house construction, to the organic pedestrianization motivated by the needs of surrounding residents. The unique past combined such forces as mentioned above points to the very specific nature of Hong Kong development, and at the same time the very organic and unplanned nature of such development. Looking to the future, as development shifts from a the more informal shapers to a more top-down planners, the road that Hong Kong and Canton Road has taken to develop thus far should not be forgotten and the resident’s power to act, which he once held cannot be taken away.
1886
1887-1904
1904-1924
1924-1939
1940
1950
Metropolis
1:2500
At the metropolis level, we analyzed the construction of tenement housing over the years as it correlated to the land reclamation in Hong Kong. We specifically investigated the areas around Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei, as they are the best indicators of our site.
Metropolis
District 1:1000
The district level also illuminated information about the ways cities are planned and develop. We tracked plotted the different buildings based on their colors, blue for pre 1940s and pink for post 1940s. This showed us a few different things, most importantly a strong divide between the east and west side of Mong Kok. (Probably due to MTR and development along Nathan Road).
District
Quotes from residents
The market street on the site
Neighborhood
1:500
In the neighborhood we looked to visually represent the reality of our site. It is actually a place full of tenement housing, however there is a strong market area in the Canton Road part of the site, and people densely populate the area. This is show by the blue bars (indicating population at given points). The pink is the populations of the buildings, during the day, which are not actually used to their capacity as compared to the streets.
Usage of constructed spaces
Select tenement housing block to analyze
Block
1:250
The block scale model displays the amount of people living in various tenement housing blocks. During th night, the tenement housing blocks are full beyond their capacity due to cage houses in the blocks. Each wooden block in the model represents the accepted amount of space per person who lives in the tenement housing blocks. The tower displays a stark contrast between the actual height of the tenement houses, and the needed space for the amount of people.
Metropolis
Room
1:50
The diagram displays an analysis of the rooms which give us a depiction of the cage homes within the tenement housing blocks. These cage homes are compact and space efficient, however, ignore human amenities and proper living conditions. This forces residents to utilize the street level, markets and gardens in the site.
Metropolis
Project 2
Manifesto Project 2 brought together the analysis of the tenement housing and the development tracking through history and through the site. With the critique of big-box malls like Langham Place, local structures, culture and institutions are destroyed. This calls for a different style of development that acknowledges the pre-existing fabric but brings new innovation. Taking the major transportation, commercial and cultural artery of the site, Canton Road, as the axis for development, this plan will place conservation on the interior facing blocks and begin to become more and more varied as the development moves outward away from the axis
First Zone This zone calls for conservation of interior facing facades and variation on all other parts. This intervention will not be able to edit or change the floor plan of the existing building, only allow for editing of individual units or floors.
Metropolis
Second Zone This zone allows for more changes in the floor plan, however restricts development to the original height and must not add or take away floor area-only displace.
Metropolis
Third Zone This zone allows for major changes in the block and gives free range of the floor plan and height. However, this can only be done at a block level-so adjacent blocks cannot be combined to create large scale towers, shopping malls or office towers.
Metropolis
Project 3: Inspiration
Local Code
Michael Sorkin
The local code is a set of rules for development. This was impactful for my project as I started to develop the site with a set of zones and rules for these zones. I began to create codes for the development of my block. This allows us to see an ideology and rules coming directly from this ideology impacting the fabric.
The Sidewalks of New York 1.
The Streets belong to the people!
2.
So do the Sidewalks.
3. A minimum of 50% of the Street space of New York City shall be taken out of the realm of high-speed and mechanical locomotion and assigned the status of Sidewalk. 4. This minimum shall apply on a Block by Block basis. 5. The entirety of a given Street may be transferred to the status of Sidewalk with the consent of 75% of the membership of the Block Committee. 6. A Block Committee shall be comprised of all of those of voting age whose primary work-place or residence is accessed from a given Block. 7. All New York City Sidewalks, including these additions, shall revert to ownership by the City of New York, which shall assume primary responsibility for their maintenance. Notwithstanding this obligation, the right to control the disposition of uses on each Block shall be shared by the Block Committee and the City of New York, subject to the over-riding general rights of Passage and Assembly. 8. A Block shall be understood to be the space from corner to corner defined by a single Street, not a square block, and shall encompass the Sidewalks on both sides of the Street. Each square block shall be understood as including portions of four different Blocks. 9. Block Corners, the junctions of Blocks, shall be assigned to one of the impinging Blocks such that each Block shall control two out of the four Corners it engages. 10. Such assignment shall be random.
11. The consolidation of Blocks for purposes of the administration by the Block Committees of elements of the blocks that exceed that space of a single Block shall be permitted as long as the consolidation is of Blocks that are contiguous. 12. In no case may this consolidation be permitted to exceed four contiguous Blocks. 13. All uses on the Sidewalk shall be public or accessible to the public. 14. Neither the Right of Passage along the Block nor the Right of Assembly within the Block shall be fundamentally infringed or impaired. 15. No Assigned Public Use (APU) shall impede walking or standing rest within the area of the designated minimum Territory Of Passage (TOP).
High-Income Blocks. 22. Permitted uses shall include sitting, the playing of games and miscellaneous other recreational activities, gardening and agricultural activities, the storage of bicycles, the capture of rainwater, the care of children, the management of waste, the planting of trees, public toilets, and the sale of books, journals, newspapers, and snacks. 23. The area of any Block necessary for access to the New York City Transit system, including both street-level and underground operations, shall be designated a corpus seperatum and its maintenance shall be the responsibility of the Transit Authority. 24. Uses of sidewalks shall be classified as either Grandfather or Sunset uses.
16. The use of Sidewalks, other than for Passage or Assembly, including loitering and standing rest, shall be determined by Block Committees which may assign rights to their use other than for Public Passage or Assembly. Such subsidiary public rights shall be assigned on a rotating basis.
25. Grandfather uses are to be permanent. Sunset uses are subject to annual review by Block Committees.
17. In no case may more than 5% of the area of any Block be occupied by a use that requires direct payment by the public to access its benefit. 18. Fees from the assignment of public rights shall profit the Block from which they are derived except in the case of High-Income Blocks.
27. Minimum Passage shall be a lateral dimension between ten feet and half the width of the expanded Sidewalk, whichever is greater, and shall be harmonized with the dimensions of contiguous Sidewalks. These dimensions shall be established by Department of City Planning with the advice and consent of the Block Committees.
19. A High-Income Block shall be understood to be a Block on which revenue from fees shall exceed by more than 50% the median fee collected from all Blocks, city-wide.
28. Street Trees shall be planted such that they shall, within five years of their planting, provide adequate shade over the full area of the Block during the months of summer.
20. 25% of the revenues from High-Income Blocks shall be tithed to the Block Bank.
29. The location and species of these trees shall be established by the Department of City Planning with the advise and consent of the Block Committees.
21. The Block Bank, the directors of which shall be composed of representatives from the Block Committees, shall make Block Grants for improvements to Blocks that do not qualify as
26. Grandfather uses shall include Minimum Passage and Street Trees.
Building Entopia C. A. Doxiadis
This text depicts a very organic and dynamic growth of cities and urban fabric. Also it posed questions about quality of life and kinds of development. This inspired me to follow up with a more organic and integrated approach to development. It also deals heavily with the human scale.
Dystopia or the bad city This future is the result of the continuation of present trends and means a real disaster for Anthropos. There is no doubt that because of the explosion we break and destroy the values created in the past. We know this and we are beginning to protest. These values are deep in our hearts but we do not respect them in actual practice. There is a saying in Japan that “we would like to grow old and die in Kyoto”, but at the same time multi-storied buildings are being built in the old part of the city which loses its value. There is a reason for this failure: we think that the value is contained in the appearance of the old parts and that we can design more fashionable ones. But the real value of many older parts of cities is that they represent the human scale and we cannot abandon it unless we want to turn into ants or bees. It is characteristic that we are studying how Anthropos may some day return to where he came from and live in the water. Is this not a sign of broader confusion which leads more and more towards a bad city? Some people state that the reason we continue moving towards the bad city is technology, but the truth is that we have achieved a lot through modern technology for our cities. Never before did Anthropos have such good means of Did Anthropos have such good means of transportation as a modern motorcar or any such wellbuilt, well-heated or cooled, well-connected and served houses. The technological progress is huge. When we place all these extraordinary achievements together, however we can see where they have all failed: by bringing together all of the elements of progress into a meaningless and inhumane system of life. I present this view of the city at night because one of the things we forget is that electricity has brought a very strong fourth dimension into our cities. During the day, when we are very high up, and do not hear the noise (although we do receive a part and suffer from it) we see you three-dimensional city but at night it becomes a four-dimensional one. The three-dimensional jungle that we build is really a
multi-dimensional one which does not at all serve many of our needs. Anthropos, home, human scale and peace have disappeared, as we can see at night from a multi storied building. We cannot see people but only buildings and machines with continuously changing lights. Why do we believe that we can become human if this is the message that we receive? Why do we believe the children growing in such a city can look at our world in a human way? Utopia or the non-feasible city This is the future that most experts talk about today. Some consider utopia to be the city of dreams by confusing it with us eftopia (the good city) but they do not know what good city means. Other proposed some ideals like Walden Two, but they do not mention that this escape to small cities isn’t a feasible solution as it is against the first two principles of Anthropos. Most of these efforts of our era, since confusion started, prove that we do not understand the real values of the past and the achievements of Anthropos, and we try to create many things in our cities which do not serve our human needs in humane ways. We only have to look at the most of the proposals for the cities of the future or look what we create on many occasions and will understand Anthropos is forgotten. I do not need to mention all our problems in human settlements as everyone suffers from them but I can mention some which are not yet understood. This is not the only aspect of confusion created by this new proposals. It is very good that we cannot afford to pay for the cities, because if we build them Anthropos will suffer as never before. In an environment which may consist of beautiful rooms and homes, the life of Anthropos will be tragic because we’ll be depraved of any possibility of walking in the street and meeting people and interacting with them.
Entopia or the desirable and feasible city Entopia must be the city which helps Anthropos for his own benefit; that is, what is the main goal of the entopian city? From history and from what has been said and discussed, my conclusion is that the goal of the city is: To make people happy and safe as Aristotle defined. But the goal of the city is also to: help people for human development as he must today because Aristotle was speaking of Anthropos living in a static world and therefore happiness and safety were the only satisfactory goals. Today we live and then changing world and we have a great task of helping Anthropos to develop a human way so that he does not adapt to an inhuman city and suffer from it, but develops in a way enabling him to control the situation and adapt the city to his basic needs to remain human and develop in the best way possible. There is a fourth goal which is so important that has to be stated separately as a fourth goal. It is the goal: to help people be equal. As we do not speak only of an average person but, of all mankind and we must be sure that we do not work for one, before all. This means that the city must be the city of people of equal rights or Isopolis. To reach our goals and to see how we can create Entopia we must escape from my present confusion. We must use knowledge, courage and imagination and must clarify what we mean by happiness, safety, development and quality which is a much better and broader clear goal than the quality of life we usually speak about-as well as we can. A different way to look at the city A different way of looking at the complexity of the problem of how far the city reaches is given by one of it social aspects, the institutions to which people belong. It is clear that any Anthropos has direct connection with his room, home, neighborhood, community etc. But also belongs
to institutions like family, clubs, church, professional or business organizations etc. The first connections are related to space but this is not necessarily true for the institutions. If we superimpose them a space we can see that more often than not they do not coincide. That’s the conclusion is clear the city can be seen in very many ways in terms of space and area and we have to find a way to study it as systematically as possible, and to concentrate on those units which are important. The conclusion is clear we have to see all the units and each one properly and inserted into the larger one and properly built up by smaller ones. This is ekistic synthesis, whose study demonstrates the great complexity of the situation because the loss of synthesis in the force of each unit changes from one to the other. From social inequality to equality The social aspect in city-building is now completely overlooked. In the past, people managed to create balance cities where everyone has equal rights in the streets and in building their houses. The economy, the technology and the balance that people manage to create led, for example, to cities with houses of equal heights. Some few cities had one story buildings many two or three ones and those cities squeeze within the walls were becoming too large to move up to five or six stories with slight variations from part to part. Now many cities allow those who have large pots or special financial villages to create skyscrapers while their neighbors remain down below. This is among other things, a great social injustice. There is an imperative need for great change. This would be the definition that all citizens who owned land do not own the sky and they cannot scrape it. They only own the three stories high and two stories underground. This space above the third story should belong to the community, up to a certain height to the
city on the community level, to the nation beyond the city level. We cannot build Anthropolis by allowing anyone who manages it to exploit the space and create social injustices. It also has to be the city of equal people or Isopolis as this is one of the four basic goals.
Project 3: Initial Acts
From the text Building Entopia, I began to question the traditional modes of transportation and development (the grid), and began test various other ways of development and transportation that intersected the blocks and interacted with them.
(Below) Codes helped me to develop the logic of the project, calling for interaction from different players in the site (even the critiqued big-box buildings like Langham).
(Above) New passages of transportation and development began to be developed off of the Canton Road and Langham Hotel intersection.
Code 3 calls for a structure that can create a new program type in the site, (the Municipal Building) which is nowhere else in the site.
Project 3: Midterm
New Artery This new axis of development began to develop into an artery for the local residents as well as those people coming from Langham. The new municipal building would directly service these intersecting buildings and provide a passage to transportation in Langham Place.
Project 3: Final
The axis is populated with programs that refer to both existing programs and indicated need. This becomes a place for programs to be placed based on location on the axis. For example, as the axis intersects the market, an access point is provided in the axis.
Residential Building Access Market Access Work Space Road Access Green Space Public Ammenities
Municipal Building Modules First Zone of Development Second Zone of Development
Residential Building Access Market Access Educational/Library/Art Space Road Access Green Space Public Ammenities Plaza Access Commercial Space Restaurant Space Recreation Space