Masterplanning the Adaptive City

proved commercially successful, with linked properties largely owned by the
developer Hong Kong Land renting at the same or even higher rates than those on
the street, the government began constructing more links to improve connections
to transit facilities. Exterior fringe belts, often older street networks lined with
small shops with an atmosphere of their own, reconfigured as projects like the
1994 Central and Mid-Levels Escalator and brought new crowds. In the late 1990s
and 2000s, the air-conditioned interior arcade linking train station to shopping mall
to office or home became the organizational framework of Hong Kong’s urban life
in comprehensive developments such as the International Financial Center and
Quarry Bay Center, or, further afield, developments over the Olympic, Sha Tin and
Kowloon stations of the city’s Mass Transit Rail (MTR) stations. The mutation
became the norm. Hong Kong’s public sphere is a public-sphere: an atmosphere 
of public life. 
SOMETHING IN THE AIR
Atmosphere fascinates architects because, like the soul, it is simultaneously
intangible and primal. Mark Wigley neatly explores these contradictions in his 
1998 “Architecture of Atmosphere.”
3
Since the modern period, atmosphere has
been portrayed as equal parts powerful and ephemeral, from Reyner Banham’s
“well-tempered environment” to, in a more contemporary context, Sylvia Lavin’s
“kiss” and Jeff Kipnis’s “blush.”
4
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PUBLIC-SPHERES
Footbridge on Chater
Road linking air-
conditioned shopping
arcades in the Mandarin
Hotel and Prince’s
Building, 1965. 
Photograph courtesy of
the Government of the
HKSAR.

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Atmosphere has become equally alluring to studies of the origins of modern
civic space in urbanism and political theory. David Gissen describes the works of
architects Pierre Patte and Eugene Henard, engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe
Alphand, and civic planner Georges Haussmann, who, in his words, “ensnared
water, gas, trees, stone, and animal and human ablutions into a circulatory vision
of an urban streetscape . . . designed to circulate both nature matter, ‘bourgeois’
concepts of leisure-nature, and state-capitalist notions of nature (nature furthering
real estate investment, among other economic aspects).”
5
German philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk has described the history of artificial atmosphere as beginning
with the 1848 Palm House at Kew Gardens, designed by Decimus Turner and
engineered by Richard Burton. Heated by coal boilers in its basement that fed
water pipes under iron gratings in the floor, the Palm House combined active and
passive environmental management to sustain an environment suitable for the
keeping of various species of exotic palms being returned to Britain from colonial
possessions. To Sloterdijk, the Palm House “marked a clear caesura in the history
of building,” by recognizing that “organisms and climate reference each other, as it
were, a priori.”
6
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JONATHAN D. SOLOMON
A network of publicly
and privately developed
footbridges join
diverse programs 
in Central, 2010. 
Photo by Jonathan 
D. Solomon. 

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There is rich interest in the creation of atmosphere in contemporary art 
and architecture practice, much of which embodies both a pursuit of adaptive
morphology and spatial effects and a critique of static definitions of the public.
Olafur Eliasson’s 2003 Weather Project at the Tate Modern in London manipulated
humidity, heat, and light to conflate the boundless experience of the exterior within
the enclosed. An Te Liu’s 2008 Cloud at the eleventh Venice Architecture Biennale,
is an assembly of air purifiers, ionizers, washers, humidifiers, and ozone air
cleaners running continuously. “Cloud is read” writes Mason White, “as a
machined equivalent of an actual cloud abstracted into its components of
moisture processing, air exchanges and atmospheric densities and imagines the
potential, as with snow-making machines, of generating entire weather conditions
at will, . . . its own bubble of processed air dissipating into the larger space, an
invisible zone of purity shape-shifting with the interior microclimates.”
7
Diller
Scofidio + Renfro describe their 2002 Blur Building on Lake Neuchatel,
Switzerland more simply, as “an architecture of atmosphere.”
8
Utilizing water 
as a building material, 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles emit fog generated 
from the water of the lake below. The Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover
actualizes what Sloterdijk refers to as “an operational unit of the sprawling 
triad of space station, greenhouse, and Human Island.” “A hybrid form between
botanic garden and large residence,” he writes, “this brilliantly bizarre building, 
a kind of vertical plant-tower, offers a contemporary comment on an expanding
definition of dwelling spaces of biotopic diversity under conditions of high urban
density.”
9
A review of projects collected by Zoe Ryan for the 2006 exhibition The Good
Life at the Van Alen Institute in New York reveals a particular fascination with the
adaptability of atmosphere to structure the public realm. Rebar’s (PARK)ing (2005)
converts San Francisco parking spaces into urban parks using sod and potted
plants; Greyworld’s public art projects in the UK, Ireland, France, and Germany
(1996–2005) convert street furniture and guard railings into musical instruments;
Takano Landscape Planning Company’s Takachi Ecology Park in Obihiro City,
Japan (2006) includes inflatable domes to simulate weightlessness and a “fog and
water environment that changes constantly depending on the weather conditions”;
temporary urban beaches convert highways to recreational spaces in Paris,
Amsterdam, Brussels, and Rome.
10
While atmosphere generates broad interest, it has remained largely a
boutique project for urbanism. With the exception of projects such as Masdar, the
zero-carbon city in Abu Dhabi masterplanned by Norman Foster, comprehensive
solutions remain elusive. Evolved and adaptable conditions such as those in Hong
Kong therefore offer rich opportunities for study.
HONG KONG’S PUBLIC-SPHERE
Hong Kong is an ideal testing ground for how atmosphere catalyzes and organizes
public life at an urban scale. The city lacks any of the figure–ground relationships
that traditionally bring order to public space in either the western or eastern
tradition: there is no axis, edge, or center. Even the ground itself, and the streets,
courtyards, and squares that populate it, are elusive.
11
In their place, microclimates
of temperature, humidity, noise, and smell constitute entirely new social
hierarchies. Welcome to the public-sphere. 
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PUBLIC-SPHERES

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