All contents related to 2019 CCHU course are placed and archive here.

Category: 2019 Blog

Cat Links Workshop 2

[Mood Board] Boxed

Posted on Wong Yan Shun

Social distancing is the way we beat the virus as the whole world begins to realize in the front of a major global crisis. Although first cases have been reported in November of 2019, we have yet to see it’s full extent in spreading worldwide faster than ever. While the West seemed to have been heavily critical of China’s ability in contain the virus, they too have bot been able to slow down the outbreak in their countries, truly showing no country seems prepared against this pandemic. Should we put the focus towards why it happened, who is to be

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Cat Links Uncategorized, Workshop 2, Workshop 2 Costumes, Characters & Urban Situations

[Mood Board] Relationships

Posted on Li Ziyuan

The break out of the coronavirus forces people to live in a different way- home-office, online shopping, no-social activities, etc. This significant change restricts people’s movements, as everyone cannot even walk out or gather with friends and family. We may be able to stay with parents, but conflicts between generations happen more frequently. We cannot hang out with friends but playing with the phone, so the relationships between friends and colleagues are distant. So, what will happen to an individual’s relationships? Stemming from the aspects of relations between people during such a unique situation, I will create a documentary describing

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Cat Links Urban Infrastructure as Event

[Reading Reflection-Ackbar Abbas]

Posted on Tam Yan Chi

Whether the city is exorbitant or generic is under debate.  The truth is, cities nowadays are always altering or evolving, their images shifting with development, with their complexities exceeding that of the photographic aspects of cities. The lines between an exorbitant city and a generic one become blurred as we change our perspective: In a global context, cities might become hard to be differentiated as they run on similar systems, thus becoming generic somewhat; it is not until one takes a deeper dive that other elements of cites can be examined.  Without a ‘character’, a city would become generic.  Such

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Cat Links Monsters, Materials + Skyscrapers

[Reading Response-William Tsutsui]

Posted on Tam Yan Chi

Japanese monster shows and movies to some might be cliche popcorn shows with little plot divergences, but the genre actually carries a cultural significance on the post-war Japan and explores more serious topics as reflected by the reading. Whilst it is not difficult to deduce that films like Godzilla were meant to be a caricature of nuclear devastation and its lasting effects on the environment, other elements of these films are often overlooked– despite all the destruction or the fact that people are always facing imminent devastation, akin to how Japan has always been an epicenter of sorts of natural

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Cat Links Housing Stories

[Reading Response: Pamela Wojcik]

Posted on Chan Yuet Mikayla

In The Apartment complex, which contains unique thematic, visual, and textual frameworks addressing the different modes and possibilities of contemporary urbanism, a large community of foreign researchers examine the apartment plot in a global sense, analyzing films produced both within and outside Hollywood studios. The writers discuss the connections of the apartment plot with film noir, horror, humor, and music, discussing how various regional or historical backgrounds change the apartment plot and how the structure of the genre helps one to reconsider authors ‘ research and recognise constructive linkages and contradictions between often unrelated texts. I also believe, however, that

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Cat Links Lecture 7 Monsters, Materials & Skyscrapers, Monsters, Materials + Skyscrapers

Reading Response 3 – Monsters, Materials and skyscrapers

Posted on An Somia

Symbolic mushroom clouds, as well as the giant monsters in a Japanese city setting are used frequently in Japanese animation, manga and films, they present a regular annihilation fantasies. And showed aesthetic of destruction. Despite of the “apocalyptic nightmare” after the periodic manmade and natural destructions, there were a “salutary impact” as them as a nation and a city “won” and walked through the disaster together, and welcome an inevitable recovery. Japanese’s appreciation towards the aesthetic of shadow, in a way, shows their ability to celebrate the “harmony and strength” in the society in the dystopian environment. Nostalgia over the

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Cat Links Monsters, Materials + Skyscrapers, Sci-Fi Technoscapes

[READING RESPONSE] TsuTsui W.M. and Carl Abbott

Posted on Bryan Wong

I think there is certainly a relationship between destructive/ monstrous and cyberpunk movies. Apart from the discussion on Gojira, Akira and Ghost in the Shell we did during the tutorial, the part that talks about the walking (moving) city definitely interests me. The British architect Ron Herron depicts a Walking city with a huge self-contained mini-city that looked like a combination of giant building cranes, 1950s robots and praying mantis. As such, there are also depiction of an imaginative assumption of train as a miniature of a city, as mentioned “The train is  a moving world, it contains all surviving

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Cat Links Sci-Fi Technoscapes

[Reading Response: Carl Abbot]

Posted on Ha Chun Ming

This reading prompts me to think a lot about future cities as depicted in sci-fi movies. As a sci-fi movie fan, I have watched quite a lot of movies focusing on post-apocalyptic and dystopian citiscapes. In most cases, after an apocalypse, cities will fall, and survivors will cluster into the remaining big cities. In a recent film that I have watched, Mortal Engines, survivors of a World War gather into mobile cities, with the larger ones hunting down smaller ones for their resources. Within the major mobile city of the film (New London), social classism is predominant, as richer people

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Cat Links Housing Stories

Reading Response: Pamela Wojcik

Posted on Iris

Amanda Klein suggests, film cycles “are a series of films associated with each other through shared images, characters, settings, plots or themes.” While Pamila argued that the apartment plot has developed a new genre out of these prominent cycles. It is hard to put an apartment plot into any type or genre, where it seems to follow the equivalent trajectory of events yet the narrative highly depends on the apartment background. The apartment itself contains the initiative and porousness to work as a depiction of this movie, for example, we could easy to tell the unconscious peeping desire of the

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Cat Links Housing Stories

[Reading Response: Pamela Wojcik]

Posted on Tam Yan Chi

It is an interesting perspective to consider the apartment plot a category of its own. For one, by placing the focus on the relatively more confined yet familiar apartment space, it allows for the viewers to put their attention onto other narratives. The apartment space however also contributes to the plot by having an underlying narrative. For instance, in the Birdcage(1996), the comedy plot unfolds in the residence of Armand in South Beach, who happens to be the owner of the drag club “The Birdcage” downstairs. The plot thickens as his son is getting engaged with the daughter of an

Continue reading[Reading Response: Pamela Wojcik]