Abbas gives a very detailed analysis of architectural disappearance in aspects of culture and politics. He points out that the preservation could somehow lead to an anamorphic image, putting the culture under the gaze for visual consumption. To jump out of this hallucination, the need for culture identification is emphasised, yet, standing between the British and China, Hong Kong lacks independence, hence suffers from no self-identity.
My experience of learning Conservation makes me confused about HK culture and HK architecture sometimes, which is well explained by this reading as architectural anonymity. We learnt cases of conserving declared monuments as well as other graded buildings, they contain different architectural styles, but hard to say there is an HK style. The architectural appraisal is misleading in such a case, which just as Abbas suggests, recognizing the anonymity as the vernacular baroque or subjectivity is problematic and paradoxical. Architecture is a presentation of culture. This reading helps me to link these two things in an obvious way, and I further connect these with HK literature, which numerous of them discuss the idea of the floating city. Abbas does not give any solution to the situation. I do feel puzzled for the past, present and future; for the colonial history; for 1997, 2019, 2020… even though I am not a Hong Kong local citizen.
Yueshan, Li 3035663760
A good summary of Abbas’ text and I enjoy reading your thoughts from the perspective of a conservation student. In a way, Abbas’ text is a search of Hong Kong’s identity; an attempt to evaluate the images of the city through different (disappearing) historical / cultural context. Therefore, as you may have known already, architectural appraisal of buildings cannot only rely on the evaluation of architectural styles but also its significance to Hong Kong’s development.
With regards to anonymity and “vernacular baroque”, Abbas saw the latter as the “very elegant answer” to deal with the former, which involves “no more radical transformation of the vernacular”; “[d]iversity,[…] not in terms of a profusion of architectural styles, but in the internal modification of standardized forms” ; and “accept[ing] the proliferation of anonymous high-rise blocks as the only solution” (1997, 89). It would be great to hear what you think about this – is the vernacular baroque where people appropriated the spaces within hyperdensity something very Hong Kong?