Masterplanning the Adaptive City

46
> A. King and B. Schneider (1991) The First Global Revolution: A Report by the Council of
the Club of Rome (New York: Pantheon Books). 
47
> R. Koolhaas (2010) “Advancement versus Apocalypse,” in Ecological Urbanism, eds. M.
Mostafavi and G. Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller), 67.
48
> L. Mumford (1934) Technics and Civilisation (London: Harvest), 37–43.
49
> R. Banham (1969) The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (Chicago:
University of Chicago). 
50
> Shane, Urban Design since 1945, 29.
51
> Koolhaas, “Advancement versus Apocalypse,” 62. 
52
> S. Kwinter (2010) “Notes on the Third Ecology,” in Ecological Urbanism, eds. M. Mostafavi
and G. Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller), 104.
53
> C. Waldheim (2010) “Weak Work,” in Ecological Urbanism, eds. M. Mostafavi and G.
Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller), 118.
54
> Marshall, Cities, Design, Evolution, 116. 
55
> N. Mars and E.W. Schienke (2008) “The Green Edge,” in The Chinese Dream, eds. N. Mars
and A. Hornsby (Rotterdam: 010), 151.
56
> S. Boeri (2010) “Five Ecological Challenges for the Contemporary City,” in Ecological
Urbanism, eds. M. Mostafavi and G. Doherty (Baden: Lars Müller), 447.
57
> Kwinter, Requiem for the City, 81.
58
> R. Banham (1960) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Oxford: Butterworth-
Heinemann), 11.
59
> Mumford, The City in History, 302.
60
> Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan, 19.
61
> Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan, 37, 295, 304. 
62
> Marshall, Cities, Design, Evolution, 217.
63
> M. Mostafavi and D. Leatherbarrow (1993) On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time
(Cambridge: MIT), 5.
64
> M. Hensel and T. Verebes (1998) Urbanisations (London: Black Dog).
65
> R. Koolhaas (1996) “Architecture against Urbanism,” in Managing Urban Change, eds. 
Y. Verwijnen and P. Lehtovuori (Helsinki: UIAH), 121.
66
> S. Kwinter (2002) The Architecture of Time (Cambridge, MA: MIT), 214.
67
> Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 2, 180.
68
> Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 2, 198. 
69
> Marshall, Cities, Design, Evolution, 255–256.
70
> Marshall, Cities, Design, Evolution, 255–256. 
71
> Alexander, The Nature of Order, Book 2, xiv. 
72
> Marshall, Cities, Design, Evolution, 218. 
73
> L. Mumford (1986) The Lewis Mumford Reader, ed. D.L. Miller (Athens, Georgia:
University of Georgia Press), 104.
74
> I. McHarg (1995) Design with Nature (London: Wiley).
75
> S. Wheeler (2011) “Urban Planning and Global Climate Change,” in The City Reader, eds.
R.T. LeGates and F. Stout (London: Routledge), 460.
76
> Wheeler, “Urban Planning and Global Climate Change,” 460. 
67
URBANIZATION AND ERASURE

---

“This is truly a surreal place,” begins the Discovery Channel’s special on Ski
Dubai, a 22,500-square-meter indoor ski arena in Mall of the Emirates.
1
Ski Dubai
opened in 2005 and includes a four-hundred-meter long, eighty-five-meter high run,
and four other slopes of varying difficulty. While even among the world’s indoor
beaches and ski slopes the climatic differentials at Ski Dubai are extreme—the
average high temperature in Dubai in August is forty-one degress Celsius, while
the temperature in Ski Dubai varies from between one degree below zero in the
day and six degrees below when snow is produced at night—they are not
necessarily unexpected. In fact none of the manipulations of program, of
topography, or of climate at Ski Dubai are outside the reality of the contemporary
urban experience or the definition of public space in cities, from colonialism
through globalism. 
Like Dubai, Hong Kong is a city of the unexpected and improbable. Its
complexity denies stable relationships between public and private spaces and
distinctions between formal and informal operators that are the traditional purview
of the masterplan, in favor of evolutionary processes, mutations of code, or
accidents that produce new species. Nowhere can this better be seen than in the
changing role of atmosphere in forming and organizing the city. The complexes 
of interconnected, air-conditioned interiors spreading in three-dimensional
networks for kilometers across the territory appear at a scale suggesting planed
implementation, but their slow growth in a series of incremental and often
unforeseen moves reveals substantively different origins; their remarkable effects
on public life in the city reveal equally unanticipated consequences. 
Networked atmospheres in Hong Kong are neither the result of formal
masterplanning nor of informal solution finding, rather these networks have
developed aformally, as a result of processes neither entirely informal nor 
entirely formal, but through collaborations between comprehensive planning 
and bottom-up solution finding, resulting in unique divergences.
2
The accident that begins this particular divergence is the invention of the
modern air-conditioner, introduced into the city broadly beginning in the 1960s. 
For a century after its founding, urban form in Hong Kong extended and blurred
distinctions between inside and outside, working to cool through strategies
ranging from shade trees on public streets to deep, high-ceilinged arcades
protected from the sun by bamboo screens, to cross-ventilated interiors. With the
introduction of the air-conditioner this boundary space was radically reduced, to
the thickness of a pane of glass. At the same time the energy differential between
interior and exterior climates was radically increased, an increase that feedback
would only further, as hot exhaust from the interior was routinely vented directly
into the street.
Mutation of this atmospheric boundary brought about new spatial products.
Artificially cooled interiors became a new space for commercial activity, proving
popular and outgrowing the small building footprints of the city’s colonial grid.
Footbridges, beginning as privately funded projects to increase the profitability of
second-level arcades in the1960s, gradually formed a network. As the network
CHAPTER 8
JONATHAN D. SOLOMON 
>PUBLIC-SPHERES
ATMOSPHERE AND ADAPTABLE 
SPACE IN HONG KONG

---