[Reading Response: Ackbar Abbas]

As the last tutorial, we discussed a text from Ackbar Abbas, again, as a perfect round up of the whole course. One of the main elements in this text is ‘generic’ and ‘exorbitant’ cities, categorising cities from their overall architectural appearance, but I somehow question these definition. Referring to my very first reading response on Ackbar’s text about ‘disappearance’, the word describing Hong Kong ‘placeless’ and ‘anonymous’ basically means the same as ‘generic’. I don’t know if it really is a negative description or just my perspective, however, I would like to further extend my thoughts from that response. Architecture or urban planning is vastly affected by a place’s history and culture, here I guess the best ‘exorbitant’ cities example would be the European’s cites, London, Paris, Rome, Moscow etc. However, being exorbitant have a huge historical reason, that they were once huge kingdoms in not long ago. The case is much more apparent for the British and Spanish, they colonised the whole world to become ‘the empire on which the sun never sets’, exporting their population, their language and of course, their architecture. In the process, architecture styles in other places were blend and lightened, or further developed as modernised cities (just like Hong Kong), resulting an impression of some places being more ‘generic. In my point of view, every city has their own culture and history, hence unique architecture, as long as a city tells the story of how and why they become what they are today, it is an ‘exorbitant’ city.

Cheung Yik Hei Anson | 3035700776