“Building on Disappearance: Hong Kong architecture and colonial space” is written by Ackbar Abbas, who’s devoted to the intriguing and provocative exploration into Hong Kong’s culture, architecture, and culture. In this essay, he tries to investigate how Hong Kong’s architecture and urban landscape responded to the colonial history, globalization and market system, as well as creating its own local identity in its culture of “disappearance”, or rather, constant change throughout time and power. He hopes that with more emphasis on local cultural memory and more open discussion on hyperdensity, Hong Kong could indeed form its own subjectivity and
avoid being a “non-place” under the global trend.
The essay was published in 1997, the monumental year of Hong Kong when it was confronting with the handover from UK to China, which created some social panic and further led to the property speculation. The spatial identity of Hong Kong is therefore problematic and many architecture in this period face imminent ruin in an arbitrary time – building on disappearance, especially for the preserved ones. From Kowloon Walled City example, the derived culture, in
Abbas’s opinion, becomes a “kitsch” which makes the memory glamorous by neglecting the dirt and pain – the preservation of architecture on disappearance could still erase communal memory. He also gives three other examples to argue that inappropriate preservation or revitalization of historic buildings may cause a loss of city’s own cultural identity and “critical sense of
community”, under the historical “pressure” from both the colonizer and motherland.
Apart from influence from coloniality and China, Hong Kong culture and architecture are also suppressed by the market and globalization, which could be seen from those placeless skyscrapers and high-rise housing blocks. On one hand, as an international and hyperdense city, Hong Kong architecture is supposed to cater for generic global rules and house its population. On the other hand, the “timeless” city is experiencing constant changes or “progress” by historical events – “old” and “new” are blending into each other. Thus it’s crucial to develop a sense of “place” for Hong Kong, as a compensation for these pressures.
Then Abbas classifies Hong Kong architecture into three types: “Merely local”, “Anonymous” and “Placeless”, according to their level of “placeness” and “timeness”. “Merely local” is at the end of preservation for local and seedy memories while “Placeless” mainly refers to momentum buildings without much communal memories. “Anonymous” as a transitional category, is the most common standard of commercial and residential buildings. This is also the most essential type to shape Hong Kong identity after the negotiation with hyperdensity, multiple political powers and globalization.
From my perspective, “Building on disappearance” is not just about the demolishment of physical space and site in different times, but also highly related with the local culture, identity and communal memory behind buildings. What is being preserved when people are preserving something? As Abbas pointed out, preservation gives us history in site, and also keeps history in sight. Thus preservation should root itself in local context of the past, meanwhile consider the contemporary as well as future context. Not everything is worth preserving, unless it has an organic and sustainable bond with local community and users – it’s supposed to be critical and objective to a large extent, otherwise preservation is not different from razing buildings to the ground. Besides, it’s quite interesting to critically look into the “anonymous” buildings in Hong Kong since before finishing the reading, the identity of Hong Kong architecture in my mind was always at the other two ends, either extremely local nor extremely generic. Yet now I understand that anonymous buildings are closely related with hyperdensity, a remarkable characteristic of the city. They generate multiplication and concentrate multiple functions within limited space, which is probably the most realistic portrayal of the subjectivity of Hong Kong. Once the understanding of the city is really in place, building shall stop suffering from disappearance.
This is a great summary of Abbas’s reading and some key points we have discussed in the tutorials. Moving onwards from 1997, do you think “anonymous” buildings should be considered for preservation? Despite their homogeneous nature, these “anonymous” buildings have embodied generations of memories, especially housing estates like Wah Fu Estate and Shek Kip Mei Estate, which are long for demolition. It would be very interesting if you can elaborate on your interest in “anonymous” building in Hong Kong.