Housing Disparity and Autonomous Architecture

Housing Disparity and Autuonomous Architecture

As cities grow and evolve, it has become common place for cities to produce more livelihoods than there exists housing to accomodate all of them. This has often necessitated people to take matters into their own hands and build, wherever they can find space. And this is done irrespective of where the city wishes, and only molds to the profile of enforcement.

'Kowloon Walled City' marks a rare moment when enforcement was not within a jurisdiction that was immediately comprehensible to any government official. 21This allowed decades of modifications and autonomous design decisions to aggregate over time.22 But beyond this mature example of Modern slum taken to the nth degree, what is iti that attracts architects, to this particular aesthetic?

Is it the form? is it the articulation? Is it the lack of the fingerprint of the architect? Or does it have some novelty value in that it cannot and shouldn't ever be permitted to be recreated, and would that be both its appeal and its mistique? Or, to speculate one last time, is it the brief substitution of an alien set of design, manufacture, and construction parameters for a conventional set that would generally produce a global and predictable result?

Here also there lies a dilema of aesthetic judgement. In Walead Beshty's visual studies course on noise, the notion of stochastic-randomness plays in aesthetics. Is the noise itself what is appealing or the seemingly chaotic rationale behind it.

To clarify, is the appearance of randomness what is appealing? Aesthetics of chaos. Or is it the appearance of randomness with the subconscious understanding that a logic is in control? An aesthetics of complexity. Or is it the layering and interaction between a series of random or complex logics that gives the initial appearance of chaos coupled with the layering of systems beyond immediate digestability that produces something above or beyond chaos? An aesthetics of a higher order of complexity only partially revealed.

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1 The large cluster of buildings that makes up Kowloon Wall City23 2 Units looks similar yet stangely not.24 3 Stacks of units belong to different individual buildings.25

So as we break down Kowloon Walled City, and additional oddities like desire paths and the historical cannon of slums and tenements, it becomes clear that there are mid-century humanist urban designers like Jane Jacobs might believe that this drive for orthogonality is simple visible levels of order might be attributed to residual megalomanaical Modernist influence. Alternatively, it could also be the desire by a totalitarian power to collect and direct the otherwise scatterplot looking construction of things like clothes hanging out to dry and desire paths.

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2 1 This section daring shows the dense but organized spatial arrangement26 2 Interior view shows the squalid conditions of a pedestrian inside27