“Gates with craved patterns in the urban fabric — city” Ma Yin Lam Minnie
Video Link: https://youtu.be/IoB7BAspQSM
Various cinema languages and dialogues try to discuss the roles of gates with craved patterns in collectively formatting the urban fabric in the selected neighborhood with the built environment ——Man Wah Sun Chuen. Through the predictable disappearance of craved patterns’ gates, the video also anticipates the possible deconstruction of the existing “fabric” of the neighborhood because of redevelopment (Andrew,2023).
According to Yau Tsim Mong District Council (2021), Man Wah Sun Chuen is about to be large-scale redeveloped as a comprehensive development area, including high-rise commercial buildings and hotels. However, I do not verbally mention anything about reconstruction throughout the video but rather visually story-tell the community as a space that has been transiting to reconstruction.
The video metaphorically satirizes that residents do not have autonomy for the future of their community. Beginning with the homage to Fruit Chan, the perspective for viewing Man Wah Sun Chuen is from the bard-wired fence. A similar fence can be seen in “Made In Hong Kong”: three protagonists are separated from the fence in the playground to look at their peers in school (Cheung, 2009). I try to convey a similar sense of prison; residents are “imprisoned” to unable to access the world outside the fence——their community. This is because they do not have decision-making power for their neighborhood; plenty of ethical minorities who are living in Man Wah Sun Chuen are forced to move and give up the bonding that they have endeavored to build up (Chow, 2022). Moving to the subsequent scene, the composition tries to provide new spatial visuality. The scene is occupied by the glamorous high-rise residential building and the lateral side of one of the blocks in Man Wah Sun Chuen from left to right. Apart from showing the contrast between their architectural structural forms, it also allegories the future of Man Wah Sun Chuen.
Through some tiling and panning movements, the dense, grassroots and aging spatial environment in the community is shown. Man Wah Sun Chuen is one of the early composite building projects in Yau Ma Tei, which is comprised of eight blocks to respond to rapid housing demands from the body boom (Eunice, 2018). It is developed in the early 1960s with an outstanding architectural form—— trapezoid appearances in the upper part (Eunice,2011). The slopes of the blocks resulted from the Right of Light which was added to the Building Ordinance in 1969; it drew an upward-sloping line at an angle of 76 degrees to the buildings on both sides starting from the center of the street for sunlight and ventilation before the occurrence of high-rise buildings (DeWolf, 2017). According to the Nepalese community coordinator Judy Gurang, the bevel shapes of the blocks are similar to the gesture of “Namaste” which is used for expressing greetings of Indian and Nepalese people (Chow, 2022). This connects to the idea mentioned in lesson 6: “Architecture is the imagination itself”; the exterior of the housing in Man Wah Sun Chuen motivates people to link with Hindu greetings.
A panning shot from left to right at the junction of Man Ying Street and Man Shing Street depicts the distinctive street design of the community. According to The Hong Kong Institute of Architects (2012), the “grid-street network” spatially enables residents to get close to each other because the ground stores and housing are seamlessly connected (Photo 1). The street design is easy to pass and involves many intersections, fulfilling the ideal standard of proximity and accessibility (Wangbao, 2022). The street setting results in street vitality; residents expand their activities from private spaces to public spaces namely the streets, including the woman who is separating the cardboard and those who talking with each other near the road. Without human activities and community bonding in streets, gates with craved patterns are only one of the components of architecture that are unable to yield sociocultural influence.
The video wants to add an argument based on the idea of Jarvis: Gates with craved patterns are far beyond the culture but shape the identity of Man Wan Sun Chuen inextricably with the built environment. The scholar Jarvis adopted metal gates in Art Nouveau style to highlight gates as are important aesthetic source of cityscape. In addition, the video tries to emphasize that they also shape the personality of the neighborhood. The local businesses that own craved patterns’ gates are mostly “Sunset industry”, such as lumber and hardware sectors. Some of them carved their store name on the gates with craved patterns with their preferred colours and shapes. Gates with craved patterns are the symbol of small shops and long-established occupations: narrating what Man Wah Sun Chuen owns that distinguish them from other dense-domestic neighborhoods in Hong Kong.
A special scene in Gates with craved patterns suddenly changing to the rolling gates implies the disappearance of the former class will be replaced by the latter. According to Jarvis, rolling gates are more convenient because they are mass-production in contrast to the customization of gates with craved patterns. Also, the traditional crafts of making craved patterns’ gates have been losing because of few professionals (Wong, 2021). As one of the “threads” to reimagine the community as a large “tapestry,” the transformation to standardized designs of gates no longer enables them to represent the personal traits of each store. The built environment will be also influenced by the disappearance of craved patterns’ gates because architecture lose the characteristics of entrances. This may dictate how residents navigate and experience the urban environment in Man Wah Sun Cheun in the long term——a sense of belonging.
The ending echoes the beginning through the usage of associate montage. According to Hellerman (2023), associate montage refers to different shots that can be linked based on their emotional associations. I choose to end the video by connecting some shots that seem to be “irrelevant” such as an elderly who sits outside the restaurant and trellis because I want to urge viewers to reflect on the future disappearance of the urban fabric in Man Wah Sun Cheun. The disappearing of gates with craved patterns in pre-redevelopment anticipates more “threads” woven as fabric to be lost with the changing built environment of redevelopment. The last shot is a close-up of the parrot; it echoes a sense of prison at the beginning. The parrot is metaphorically described as residents in Man Wah Sun Chuen, or any of us, because we only can be forced to accept the redevelopment and any city change. The “cage” that imprisons people is the hidden unequal power relation in society; those who own power can determine our community and even our city.
Words: 1000
References
Andrew. (2023, August 16). What is Urban Fabric? Unveiling the Threads of Urban Design. KREO. https://www.kreo.net/news-2d-takeoff/what-is-urban-fabric.
Cheung, E (2009). Fruit Chan’s Made in Hong Kong. Hong Kong University Press.
Chow, Y. (2022, October 10). ‘This is our home’: ethnic minority residents of Jordon’s Man Wah Sun Chuen estate may lose community to redevelopment. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/yp/discover/news/hong-kong/article/3195210/our-home-ethnic-minority-residents-jordans-man-wah-sun.
Dewolf, C. (2017, July 31). How Hong Kong estate once home to Jackie Chan helped change the course of housing development in the city. South China Morning Post. https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/travel-leisure/article/2104459/how-hong-kong-estate-once-home-jackie-chan-soon-went.
Eunice, S. (2018). Dense Domesticities: Composite Building Histories In Hong Kong, 1950s-1970s. Hong Kong: The Univeristy of Hong Kong faculty of Architecture. https://www.arch.hku.hk/research_project/dense-domesticities-composite-building-histories-in-hong-kong-1950s-1970s/.
Eunice, S. (2011). Architecture & Urban Design (ARCH 4001) – Dwelling: Carcass. Hong Kong: The Univeristy of Hong Kong faculty of Architecture. https://www.arch.hku.hk/gallery/arch/dwelling-carcass-11-12/.
Hellerman, J. (2023, September 20). What is Pudovkin’s Montage Theory? Nofilmschool. https://nofilmschool.com/pudovkin-montage-theory.
The Hong Kong Institute of Architects. (2019). Field Trip: The basic of architectural design. https://minisite.proj.hkedcity.net/hkiakit/getResources.html?id=4719.
Wangbao, L. (2022). Spatial impact of the built environment on street vitality: A case study of the Tianhe District, Guangzhou. Frontiers in Environmental Science, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fenvs.2022.966562.
Wong, H. (2021). Hong Kong Old Charm #1: Capturing the Beauty of Old Hong Kong. iGlobe Publishing Ltd.
Yau Tsim Mong District Council. (2021). Minutes of the 13th Meeting of the Yau Tsim Mong District Council (2020-2023).https://www.districtcouncils.gov.hk/ytm/doc/2020_2023/en/dc_meetings_minutes/YTM_DC_13th_Mtg_Minutes_30.11.2021_EN.pdf.
Appendix
Photo 1: The grid pattern of the street network is shown in Man Was Sun Chuen, which is provided by The Hong Kong Institute of Architects in 2012.
Each store is next to each other while containing the vertical housing upward.