Masterplanning the Adaptive City

Cool air, whether actively generated or encouraged passively through
shading, rescripts circulation and redefines gathering spaces. At sites where a
masterplan would call up an axis, a formal solution to the representation of state
power, the free circulation of multiple modes of travel and movement of services,
and the armature of the public sphere, Hong Kong’s evolutionary development
drives aformal responses. Take the new headquarters of the Government of the
Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, located on a parcel of land named
Tamar, after a British ship that once docked in the area of the harbor from which it
was reclaimed. The Tamar site has no formal context in the city. Even its major
architectural feature, a huge gateway formed by two office slabs, leads nowhere
but into another, earlier office slab. The connection between the Tamar site and
Hong Kong Park is in no way axial, but it is no less active in the traditional role 
of the axis. The path leads down a partially enclosed escalator and through a 
high-end shopping mall, Pacific Place, across a footbridge over Queensway, a busy
eight-lane highway, and through Queensway Plaza, a shopping mall originally built
by the government and now leased to the luxury department store Lane Crawford,
through the lobby of the Admiralty Center office towers, down an escalator past
the entrance to the MTR, up another escalator to a footbridge over Harcourt Road,
another express artery, before accessing Tamar via a landscaped roof deck.
Passing through interior and exterior atmospheres, public and private spaces, and
changing constantly in dimension and direction in three dimensions, the path is
an unplanned anomaly, but one that is uniquely adapted to suit the needs of the
city.
At Admiralty, in Central, or at Taikoo Place and other dense subcenters
throughout the city, it is common to find pedestrians streaming through corridors
routed through corporate lobbies, above public parks, or under streets rather than
at grade in order to stay cool or dry. Perfumed air distinguishes distinct cultural
and economic strata that are spatially contiguous and largely indistinct from one
another. Central, a high-end shopping mall branded by Armani, is distinguished
from an adjacent and connected mall catering to Filipina foreign domestic workers
by, among other things, prodigious scents. Just across a footbridge over Chater
Road, varying access to natural light affects retail rents at the Landmark Mall. 
Up the hill along the Central and Midlevels Escalator, tourists and western
expatriates gather on a street of steep steps in much the same way. Cool air is not
the only sphere generated by Staunton’s, the adjacent pub: the smell of beer 
and cigarettes and grilling beef and the sounds of generic rock and roll, English
chatter, and clinking glasses form a microclimate distinct from the local street
market just a block away.
The public-sphere is so interesting precisely because it is a catalyst for
adaptability. The incremental growth and change of aformal armatures, the
articulation of private and public spaces (and what is permissible in both
extremes), and the atmospheric properties of spaces substitute for the “planning”
of buildings and space in their conventional senses. The result is a far more
adaptable urbanism. 
Generally appreciated for its exquisite detailing and inventive engineering,
Norman Foster’s 1985 HSBC Main Building sits adjacent to one of the last
remaining colonial public spaces in Hong Kong, Statue Square. Both the square
and the building, with its open ground plan below suspended banking halls, are
72
JONATHAN D. SOLOMON

---

host on Sundays to foreign domestic workers gathering on their government
mandated day off. David Howes uses this space, and the larger weekend
occupation of footbridges outside shopping malls, as an example of the influence
of atmosphere on the city’s public sphere. Referring to the work of urban
ethnographer Lisa Law, he describes how the sounds and scents of the foreign
workers, mostly Filipina, establish temporary cultural boundaries between their
“Little Manila” and the financial center. “This conflict within Hong Kong society,”
writes Howes, “over the sensuous (re)construction of space by the migrant
workers during their leisure hours, testifies to the politics of differing sensory
strategies for making sense of the same place, and calls attention to the
multicultural tensions embedded in the city’s urban fabric.”
12
Although the atmospheres of the contemporary city are highly planned by
MEP Engineers, they are limited to distinct spatial boundaries. The bounded
interior marks a new kind of threshold space in the city, aformal armatures
mediating between the artificially cooled, scrubbed, formally planned interiors of
the city’s offices, shops, and homes, and the hot, messy, informal life of the street.
THE CITY AS NATURAL ARTIFICE
What is the code and what is the mutation? This question is fundamental to
understanding the emergence of new forms of civic space in the contemporary
city. The public-spheres of Hong Kong attest to the malleability not only of urban
space and its patterns of use, but also of our own notions as citizens of the natural
and the artificial. Consider examples such as Hong Kong’s Cheung Kong Garden.
Opened in 2002, Cheung Kong Garden is managed by Cheung Kong Holdings but
73
PUBLIC-SPHERES
Footbridge network 
in Central Hong Kong
overlaid with a
gradient of ambient 
air temperature. 
Drawing by Adam
Frampton, Jonathan D.
Solomon, and Clara
Wong.

---