EXTREME HK

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HK EXTREME EXTERIORITY &INTERIORITY

of stopless HK The scene of no stop city is presented in real life, just near you, but it is just an exaggerated and condensed form of reality. Here, a Reyner Banham’s mechanically well-tempered environment replaces the holistic synthesis of urban planning, architecture and interior of early modernism under the logic of efficiencies and orthodox functionalism.. Such a space will only put people in a psychological state of claustrophobia and express the concept of so-called "critical utopia". According to Andrea Branzi, the main member of the group, in response to cultural crisis of modernism in the consumer society and the ever-dramatization of urban density, it is necessary to reshape the value of architecture. Architecture need to be used as a tool for political and ideological criticism. So as Hong Kong city experience is largely characterized by the mass production of standard units and consumptive pattern, the architecture need to retain an act of destruction and obstruction, in order to resist the numbness of daily life under the authoritarian capitalist system.

Hong Kong’s urban and public interiority “The interior has grown to become an endless type of urban form.” Idiosyncrasies of the quasi-iconic archetype, the endless stacking of malls and skyscrapers in Hong Kong demonstrated the most extreme scenario of indoor urbanism where the notoriously vertical articulation and network of the interior atmosphere had defined constrained and channelled commercial and domesticated spaces as unavoidable conditions for urban life. Hong Kong’s topography, density and economy compaction of high-rise, mixeduse and high-density configuration connected by a comprehensive public transportation system and pedestrian network,resulting in a typical ‘linear rail city composed of transit-oriented development with large-scale mega-structure’, in which create an urbanism of continuous “interiority”.

The intense banality of over-scale and anaesthetizing internal atmosphere in Hong Kong public spaces are predominantly produced through bureaucratic logic of organizational flow, spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, at the expense of socio-cultural manner, formulating a sense of ‘non-place’ anonymity or ‘junkspace’ replica, and of intensified Corbusier’s Plan Voisin vision. As a matter of fact, highly privitalized giant decorated shed represents the integral parts of the Hong Kong urban landscape, a result of the homogenization of corporate standardization and monotonous form of public interior spaces. As such,the interiors are arranged to condition the predictable and profitable behavioural responses according to Hong Kong consumer culture. The everchanging dichotomy between privacy and publicity is linked to mass production and consumption which urban inhabitants familiarized with the imageability of scenes depicted in mass media, a condition criticised by Superstudio and Archizoom.This artificiality belies the capacity for inclusiveness, multiplicity and contestation and absorbed all forms of social encounter in the city.

In general, the rise of individualism in the neoliberal societies and the continual restructuring of contemporary consumptive patterns together with the pandemic irruption represent profound challenges to the interface of urban interiority. The public interiors are endowed with both a spatial and temporal dimension as well as defined by architectural, social,urban and anthropological perspectives. Thus, the idea of urban interiority as collective individuation is a mode of intensity, highlights the process of interiorising as a ‘relational condition with the exterior realm’, corresponding to an event instead of merely a personal subjectification.

FIG.2 PATTERN & COLLECTIVE

POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION AND APPROPRIATION#1 Their design moves past its utopian potentials and criticisms, amplifying its surface value. They designed homogeneous living spaces without boundaries. The No-stop City was essentially conceived of as being organic and driven by the needs of its inhabitants, provoking a critique reflecting the situation that the city are arranged to condition the unpredictable and spontaneous behavioural responses from the citizens.

“Freeing mankind from architecture insomuch as it is a formal structure" The proposed metropolis is endlessly expansive and perfectly featureless, the urban landscape is barren except for the repetition of vehicle, and this time, the people took the street, in the most rigorously exaggerated juxtaposition and combination form, grabbing all sorts of elements available locally, constructing an extensive network off homogeneous and repetitive disposition as the act of civil disobedience in raising alarm to the government. People are at liberty to live as they wish and wherever they want, protesters are unavoidable in mobilizing the public road around all those ubiquitous corporate-led urban enclave,as potential stages and testing ground for ad hoc political action.

FIG.4 Protest and Road Block construction in HK

FIG.3 Informal object identified for performing protest activities

FIG.5 The urban interior of HSBC Bank in Central is augmented into expanded field of ‘temporary refuge’ for Foreign Domestic Helpers.

FIG.6The temporary cardboard units repetitively arranged along the Central elevated walkways at Exchange Square on a sunday.

POLITICS OF PARTICIPATION AND APPROPRIATION#2

Beyond the realm of commodified space, urban and public interior in Hong Kong re-contextualized under social and political forces, adapting a unique evolution of Henri Lefebvre’s right to the city notion, enabling urban inhabitants of all kinds to participate in the use and production of the spaces to meet specific needs. Here, foreign domestic helpers and aforementioned protesters are highlighted as they eminently re-activated city as to catalyse the state of emancipatory respite. Domestic Helpers from Southeast Asian countries are part of, one of the most essential community and family mark-up. Every weekend or holiday, they temporarily transforms the interstitial urban interior and exterior spaces such as elevated walkways, pedestrian tunnels, disused arcades, corporate lobbies, in which this marginalized contingent has created new spaces for culturally dedicated program of consumption and interaction that transgress the formal and commercial boundaries of the city, established an informal socio-spatial territory.

As such, the presence of these informal ecologies is fundamentally a political phenomenon of global labour migration and momentum in exercising a collective culture of solidarity and resistance. Thus, the value of no-stop city has become a specific form of agency in accommodating communities of difference in the multi-temporal and multi-spatial contemporary city.