HONG KONG: UNCERTAIN(CI)TY
WEEK 3: SPACES OF CIRCULATION
Cole Roskam “A block of tenements in which some of China's floating population dwell, Hong Kong”
roskam@hku.hk 1906
September 18, 2023 (Library of Congress)
M+ OBJECT REVIEW
Due to Turnitin by September 25 at 10:30 am (500 words)
Write a review of an architectural/designed object in the M+ Museum. Your selected object may be an image, drawing, painting, or another kind
of collected object, but it must take Hong Kong as its subject, and it must be on display.
Remember, too: your review is of the object itself, not what it might have led to or became architecturally.
IMAGE/CAPTION
Include an image of the object along with a complete caption at the top of your review: Name of artist/architect/designer, name of work,
location (if relevant), date (source for image).
SUMMARY/INTRODUCTION (100-150 words)
Provide a brief introduction or summary of the work
and its history in relation to Hong Kong – what it is, who did it, why did you select it?
Does it have a relationship to your potential conclusion idea?
(100-150 words)
ORIGINALITY (100-150 words)
- What’s new innovative about the project, and in what ways is it distinctive from other work in the field?
- Does it engage with new kinds of data? New/innovative research methods, or methods of making?
- Does it offer original insight into some aspect of Hong Kong’s built environment?
SIGNIFICANCE (100-150 words)
- How has the object/project had an influence beyond itself? Is it referenced by other artists?
- Does it feature in other forms of cultural production?
- Is its significance theoretical, methodological, and/or material in nature?
RIGOR (100-150 words)
- What evidence exists of the intellectual precision, robustness, and appropriateness of the concept, methods, and analysis underlying your
selected object?
- Is the object’s underlying position coherent and sophisticated? Is there a clear method or way of working? Was other existing work or
literature taken into account by the artist, designer, or architect?
WEEK 3, SEPTEMBER 18: SPACES OF CIRCULATION
Required Readings
Walter Benjamin, “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” (1935) in The Writer of
Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2006), 30-45.
Joshua Bolchover and Peter Hasdell, Border Ecologies: Hong Kong’s Mainland Frontier
(Basel: Birkhauser, 2016), 116-133.
Gary Hamilton, “Hong Kong and the Rise of Capitalism in Asia,” in Gary Hamilton, ed.,
Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 14-34.
Recommended Readings
Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago,
Hawaii, 1900-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1-25.
Charles Fourier (1772-1832) Charles Fourier, Un Phalanstère ("grand hotel”), early 19th century
MODERN - as the present or current; as the new; as the momentary, transient
MODERNIZATION - 19th century socio-economic development marked by technological
advancement, industrialization, urbanization
MODERNITY - an intellectual concept or attitude around the notion of disruption, i.e. a
moment distinguished from antiquity and rooted in a progressive, linear
course of history and human development
MODERNISM - theoretical and artistic ideas about modernity; the ideas espoused
by those who believe in modernity as a linear progression
Passage Bourg L’Abbe, Paris, date Passage Choiseul, Paris 1829
unknown
“View of the Boulevard du Temple” Rotunda in Leicester Square in which panoramas
Louis Daguerre were exhibited
Paris Aquatint by Robert Mitchell
1838 1801
Crystal Palace, Sir Joseph Paxton, 1851 World’s Exposition, London
Au Bon Marche
Alexandre Laplanche Boutique art nouveau
Paris Eugène Atget
1872 45 Rue st. Augustin (2e arr)
Paris
1904-05
“The flâneur”, Charles Baudelaire
From The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (1859)
“For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of
the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be
away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the
world, and yet to remain hidden from the world – such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those
independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a
prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito. The lover of life makes the whole world his family….
Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical
energy.”
- Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1863)
Typical pre-Haussmann street corner Construction of barricaded
Paris The Paris Commune
Demolition work, Avenue de l’Opera, 1854 Pierre-Ambrose Richebourg
April 1871
Street dating back to the 14th century
Paris
“A great tower of iron, whose metal pieces
crisscross like the threads of a spider’s
web/ Rises in the air and gives a strange
appearance.
Even the magical genius, Zhang Guolao,
didn’t have in his belly a forge as adept (as
that of the author of this monument).
Under the Tong and Nguyen dynasties,
bank bills were put into circulation/ But
this system was not as perfect and
praiseworthy as the modern system so
widespread in Europe/ And so profitable
to commercial transaction and
government finance.”
- - Nguyen Trong Hiep, Paris, Capitale de la “The waters are blue, the plants pink; the evening is sweet
France (1897) to look on; One goes for a walk; the grandes dames go for a
walk; behind them stroll the petites dames.”
- Nguyen Trong Hiep, Paris, Capitale de la France (1897)
“Ultimately, Nguyen’s documentary style
parallels his unconventional (to European
readers) observations as a non-western
statesman. He offers heterogeneous visual
information, delivered with compensatory
simplicity, of living conditions in 19th-century
Paris, noting practical, concrete details, as in
poem V: ‘Six or seven-floor dwellings are linked
together without discontinuity./ Even the
basements are partitioned into small
compartments.’ This acknowledgment that
Paris has been constructed to correspond to
human needs of space under the metropolitan
culture serves to remind readers present and
future, reading in Chinese or French, that
infrastructure is never wholly divorced from
social condition.”
- Charles Rice-Davis, Mia Nakayama, “Electric
Lights and Clouds of Dust: A Reading and
Translation of Nguyen Trong Hiep’s Paris,
capitale de la France (2020)
“…The real non-places of super-modernity [are] the ones we
Hong Kong inhabit when we are driving down the motorway, wandering
as Non-Place through the supermarket or sitting in an airport lunch waiting
for the next flight to London or Marseille…. Clearly the word
‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct
realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport,
transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals
have with these spaces. “
- Marc Auge, Non-Places (1995), 94, 96.
Bank of China
I.M. Pei
Hong Kong
Lui Seng Chun From Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. 1985-1990
Walter H. Bourne Solomon, Clara Wong, Cities Without
Hong Kong Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook
1931 (2012)
From Li Shiqiao, “Hong Kong: City of Maximum Quantities,”
“Looking deeper still, there is seen underlying this mixed
in Asian Alterity, William S. W. and fluctuating population of Hong Kong a self-perpetuating
Lim, ed. (2008) unity: the secret inchoative union of Europe and Asia (as
represented by China). This union is in process of practical
Hong Kong as elaboration through the combined forces of commerce,
Meeting Point between East and West civilization, and Christian education, and particularly
through the steady development of Great Britain’s political
influence in the East….”
- E.J. Eitel, Europe in China (1895), ii
“The greatest of evils have arisen in new settlements from uncertainty and confusion which has
grown out of disposing lots to individuals before their boundaries were properly ascertained.”
- Earl Grey to Governor of Labuan, October 21, 1848
Hong Kong, 1850
Attributed to Lam Qua
(Massachusetts Historical Society)
“Instead, think about Hong Kong as a place where there is an ever changing mix and an ever
Hong Kong, 1856
contested but still organized movement of people, firms, money products, and industries.”
Gary Hamilton, Cosmopolitan Capitalists (1999)
Global shipping routes, 19th century
(Ben Schmidt, Northeastern University;
Global Mail Online)
Migration map
1858
(Migration from European countries is colored in pastels; migration from African, South Asian, and East Asian countries
is colored in racialized shades of yellow and brown)
Chinese workers at a salmon cannery,
Oregon (Library of Congress)
Chinese workers on sugar
plantation, Hawai’i, 19th century Chinese laborers in Peru, 1900
(Wikipedia) (New York Public Library)
Sugar harvesting with Black and
Chinese laborers in Louisiana (U.S.),
19th century (Library of Congress)
Yaumatei, 1880s (Wikipedia) Chinese laborers aboard the steamship Alaska, bound
for San Francisco, 1876 (Bridgeman Images)
Godowns, Hong Kong
Chinese shops, Queen’s Road Central, 1856 (London
mid-19th century
Illustrated News (1856))
(John Thomson)
Queen Street, Hong Kong, 1896
Brothel, Hong Kong, late 19th century
Chinese exhibition of 1868, Hong Kong
Shipping routes, Pacific Ocean, 1938-1939
(gcaptain.com)
Lo Wu Control Point
Shenzhen – Hong Kong
Lok Ma Chau Loop
Ove Arup
Work commenced 2021
Hong Kong’s littoral space, 19th century and today
QUESTIONS
• What do today’s readings reveal with regards to Hong Kong’s liminal, “in-between”
condition? Does such flow and mobility constitute a distinctly modern condition?
• To what extent does Hong Kong’s history of movement, migration, and mobility
disrupt canonical, Eurocentric notions of modernity? Are there ways in which it
reinforces them?
• How might you characterize the relationship between architecture and the loose
flows and subsequent regulatory impulses observed in Hong Kong over time?
WEEK 3 TUTORIALS, SEPTEMBER 20 – READING A MODEL (OR OBJECT)
WEEK 4, SEPTEMBER 25 – CLIMATE (AND) CONTROL
REQUIRED READINGS
Anthony Oliver-Smith, “Theorizing Disasters: Nature, Power, and Culture,” in Susanna
M. Hoffman and Anthony Oliver-Smith, eds., Catastrophe and Culture: The
Anthropology of Disasters (Oxford: James Currey, 2002), 23-47.
H.S. Palmer, “Report on the Proposal to Establish a Physical Observatory at Hong Kong,”
Hongkong Government Gazette, 3 September 1881, 799-811.
Cole Roskam, “Constructing Climate: The Hong Kong Observatory and meteorological
networks within the British imperial sphere, 1842 – 1912.” Journal of Architecture
(published online October 15, 2021;
https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2021.1983005).
RECOMMENDED READINGS
Robin Peckham, “Hygienic Nature: Afforestation and the greening of colonial Hong
Kong,” Modern Asian Studies 49, no. 4 (2015): 1177-1209.
WEEK 4 TUTORIALS, SEPTEMBER 27 – READING A MAP
M+ OBJECT REVIEW, DUE SEPTEMBER 25
CONCLUSION PROPOSAL, DUE OCTOBER 25
