[Video Essay] Ecological City – Retreat

Settings and founding:

The campus of HKU has a history of over a hundred years, sitting on a rural hill that was once deforested to expand the campus. But interestingly, the trees and trunks cut by us humans have started to take over, stretching through the concrete facades, swallowing the brutalist architecture slowly. Whenever I walk from the Knowles Building to its hidden garden near the car park, it always feels like a total transformation of space; from a modernistic, clean, perfectionist laboratory to a complex-made, fresh, and liberated jungle.

The space immediately changes from a suffocating, stressing academic environment to a relaxed, Zen secret hide-away. There are no painted walls and sharp limelight, but a humid and lively green space where there are possibilities and unknowns of creatures. It completely contrasts to the serious, academic atmosphere of the school.

My interpretation:

Between the two extreme worlds, it is just a single, steel exit door, corroded by the air and water. It symbolises the fragile barrier set by modern human between the nature. In modernity, we strive for efficiency and perfectionism, therefore we cut off the slow growing nature from our fast-moving work pace. We think we can recreate an ideal world from the imperfect natural world, but most of us didn’t notice how insignificant we are in front of the nature.

The nature is where our origin begins, it heals our heart. But we are now taking all the natural resources for granted and still not satisfy our greed. We want more and more, so we destroy our own habitat to create the ‘utopia’, and recklessly damage the environment to fulfill our luxurious needs. Sooner, we are forgetting about where we belong, and we are even planning to leave our ruined Earth.

Theme:

[Destruction and construction]

‘Wabi-Sabi’ is a concept that I would like to deliver in this film. Said by writer Richard Powell, Wabi-sabi nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.’ It implies that we should embrace and appreciate the beauty of imperfection instead of concealing them. As said by writer Susan Sontag,’ beauties to be found in wreaking havoc’, an imperfect broken piece of substance has witnessed the history of human activities, which tells stories. Just like an old man telling his mistakes from his pasts, which has led to philosophical lessons that young people may have not experience.

Why does the concept ‘Wabi-Sabi’ relates to the theme of ecological city? As we know, nature undergoes succession. Even after several times of the disruption of a place, green plants still manage to undergo succession after the brutal changes of conditions, which can be seen through the stiff concrete facades of Knowles Building, where the plants are extending through the bridge on the fifth floor. This is the manifestation of the nature’s power. It can grow vividly in human’s construction even that it was once destroyed by us for urbanism development. But for the constructions we have made, it requires lots of manpower and resources (electricity) for maintenance, so that we can live in an illuminated, air-conditioned environment with machines for improving our working efficiency. Yet, a single fire breakout would have turned it into ruins shortly, and it will never grow again without manpower and more resource investment.

The greens are different, even without much manual care, they can grow everywhere by itself, and slowly turns into a complex, lively ecological system, which is so different from our modern architecture. They slowly rust our steel structure, or cause the paint to fall, and grow on our buildings. Ironically, we think our architecture to be invulnerable and aesthetic as we design it with the concepts of perfectionism, but the ‘perfect’ appearance won’t last forever as it will be slowly corroded without constant maintenance. People are so stubborn with the concept of ‘perfectionism’ that is thought to be the ultimate aesthetics, but we ignored about the fact that how fragile it is when it comes to the nature. We have been deforesting, inserting steels into the earth, and polluting the air to generate electricity for our buildings, but the nature still thrives.

[Disappearing City]

The campus was once thought to be impermeable and invulnerable, constructed by human with different architectural concepts such as Brutalism, Bauhaus, Functionalism. It stands still with its strong base on a rural hill, emerging from the bushes and plants.

Yet, after decades of history, the nature thrives again. Without much manual care, she grows and expands through the campus on the facades or the columns. Its organic system intervenes our buildings and looks like it is swallowing it. The campus has returned to a rural nature again by the plants’ secondary succession, and its image of clean, modernity and strength have slowly disappeared inside the thriving jungle.

Methods:

Inside the story, the main character is a student who is struggling with her academics as she never thinks it will be perfectly done. She was also stubborn with the concept of ‘perfectionism’, but she is growing suspicious towards it as she finds out that blindly pursuing perfectionism is never-ending and will never satisfy her.

Feeling exhausted, she went for a walk into the garden outside the modernistic building, which is completely a different world. The nature inspires her about appreciating imperfection, and to find a meaning in her work through exploring the imperfect part, such as the asymmetrical plants growing on the buildings, the falling paints of the walls, and the rusty handle of the exit door. Inside the garden, she found a moment of peace to rethink about the irony of building ‘perfect’ achievements while we always try to ignore and conceal the imperfect part of our world.

Her heels represent the idea of modernity and perfectionism, which is always appreciated in our society, but also brings damage to our surroundings when we are trying to maintain them. She took off her heels on a staircase where plants grow on the stone-cold walls of the brutalist building and walks away. It symbolises her realising the fragility of the concept she had been pursuing and missing all the stories behind the details of the flaws which she had been avoiding. It also shows her appreciation to the circling life of nature around us that is invulnerable and thriving even in a more extreme living condition.

She finally has her retreat, mentally and physically, from the thriving garden. She lets go of her imperial concepts and start to rethink the connection of us between the nature and embrace imperfection.

Bibliography

Abbas, M. A. (1997). Hong Kong: Culture and the politics of disappearance (pp. 63-90). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press

Tsutsui W.M. (2010). Oh No, There Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in postwar Japanese Popular Culture. In Noir urbanisms:Dystopic images of the modern city (pp. 104-126). Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Powell, Richard R. (2004). Wabi Sabi Simple. Adams Media. ISBN 1-59337-178-0.

Jeannie Qin Tsz Yan 3035932678