Feedback: Wang Weijen Hong Kong

In a spatial odyssey looking down on Hong Kong’s Central District from the Victoria Peak, one would see a wave of verticals springing up from the sloping terrain all the way down to the water edge.

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In a spatial odyssey looking down on Hong Kong’s Central District from the Victoria Peak, one would see a wave of verticals springing up from the sloping terrain all the way down to the water edge. Its fabric spreads along the harbour front as a belt of tightly woven texture, extending through the Wan Chai area and undulating all the way to the Chai Wan area. Its verticality is only punctuated by the horizontality of elevated freeways slicing through such fabric, and is momentarily agitated by multi-level junctions when different horizontal momentums – highways, subways, ferries, skywalks – overlap or intersect with the verticals.

Contrast between yesterday’s tenement blocks and today’s urban eruptions rarely disturbs our vision, but rather forms a complex totality in which one seems to compensate the other. The present constantly seeks to remake itself in an intensely opportunistic act of dismantling previous efforts with little hesitation and looking forward to new solutions. Similar to New York, London, Tokyo and other global nodes for financial capital flow, Hong Kong’s urban form reflects a gigantic rhetoric of speculation for both transaction and consumption.