STUDIO 325: Inter/Intra Cities: Ghostwriting the Future at the Venice Biennale 2012

This was originally on the Venice Blog for Building Design, you can see it on BDonline.

Opposite the entrance of the Arsenale, is a collateral exhibition which is just as worthy of attention. Titled Inter Cities/ Intra Cities: Ghostwriting the Future, the space shows twelve proposals, both real and speculative, for South East Kowloon in Hong Kong. Curated by The Oval Partnership, the exhibition seeks to find new ways of maintaining the commercial momentum which has so far defined the city, while, at the same time, engaging it’s citizens into more sustainable and diverse ways of living. The curators, with a team including founding director Chris Law and Bartlett teaching fellow Jonathan Pile, see themselves as ‘ghostwriters’, threading stories from the past, present and future, as a way of re-framing and re-contextualising both existing and new work. The latter director probably explains the strong presence of work from former Bartlett students within the exhibition.

The redevelopment of South East Kowloon was made feasible with the closure of the Kai Tak Airport in 1998. Since then, the area around the former international airport has lost some of its vibrancy, with an abandoned manufacturing industry and a huge left over stock of industrial buildings. At the same time, the traditional Central Business District (CBD) of Hong Kong can no longer keep up with the demand of the increasing numbers of multi-national companies setting foot in the city. The government have set the wheels in motion to facilitate the transformation of Kowloon East into an attractive alternative CBD of Hong Kong.

Following this transformation, the exhibition sets out the official, large-scale proposals for South East Kowloon, and also the smaller, unofficial urban guerilla activities started by the local residents. These are all spread out in the former naval warehouse on spray-painted green scaffolding that holds intricate models and projects videos from local citizens and Hong Kong architects.

Outside the exhibition space, in the forecourt, is a piece by HK Farm/ HK Honey, two organisations of aspiring farmers, beekeepers and artists. You are immediately welcomed into an aromatic enclave of local plants grown in movable wooden planters, representing the work HK Farm do in terms of rooftop farming and urban agriculture in the city.

Inside, a remarkable model, ‘Imaginary Kai Tak’, stands within the green scaffolding in all its Bartlett glory. It is by CAVE, a young Hong Kong-based architectural practice established in 2011 by three graduates from the Bartlett, and depicts a speculative future Kai Tak city. Here, among the glass test tubes, candy pink wind turbines and bubble-like clouds are six narratives that developed into six device systems. The young architects really seem to have let their imagination run wild, with an ‘Octopus Motor Cotton Mill’, with no sign of cotton being made, and a ‘Kowloon Dock Shipyard’, again, with no sound of boats being repaired. I don’t particularly understand its subtle nuances, but this is the kind of imagination that could sustain the aim of making Hong Kong more diverse and less commercial. Another beautiful model came from the Oval Partnership, titled ‘The Shared Sky’, a bamboo structure that occupies the air zone above existing tower blocks which is free to all residents of Hong Kong.

The exhibition, in essence, is all about looking at the cracks and hidden crevices, above, below and between the buildings of the city. Without these semi-legal, unofficial and unplanned approaches, a city can become sterile and boring. As the curators say, these proposals, “with a little water, might flower into a rich meadow”.