Roll out a carpet, hang up a screen. The sloped Centre Street in Sai Ying Pun has transformed into an outdoor cinema for one night at the Mid-Autumn Festival. While enjoying movies about the neighbourhood under the ‘full moon’, community members and the general public are invited to re-imagine the public spaces of one of the oldest districts in Hong Kong.
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Author Archives: Maurice Harteveld
Hong Kong Biennale 2013
In its 5th edition, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture (UABB) has baan the only biennial exhibition in the world to be based exclusively on the themes of urbanism and urbanization. The Biennale has been co-organized by Shenzhen and Hong Kong, two of the most intensely urban cities in the world, where political and economical contexts have shaped unique urban dynamics.
Colin Fournier, chief curator, states:
Beyond the edge of the city we know lies the city we dream of, the city we long for but never reach, the “ideal city”. At the edge, the old rules of the city loose their hold, allowing it to reinvent itself, redefine its values and create new forms. The edge is never far away: the city of our dreams might be here and now, close to us, nesting within the familiar confines of our towns, transforming them from the inside, a city within the city, the boundary between the known and the unknown being conceptual rather than physical. What do we most desire from our cities and from their architecture? What are our current interpretations of the ideal city? Is the question still relevant? Is Hong Kong an ideal city? If not, what would it take to become one? And for whom?
Hong Kong – Shenzhen | Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism Architecture 2013 港深城市|建築雙城雙年展
(2013 UABB*HK)
Re-Do New Town: The Square and the Big Tree in Lo Uk Tsuen Village
Hong Kong Institute of Architects 香港建築師學會
Staccato of Place and Project
Franklin Court Threatened
The proposed redesigns for Benjamin Franklin Life & Legacy Museum as situated in Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park have been quite worrisome.
As an architect, urban designer and academician, I have been grateful for the request for input by of the U.S. National Park Service. It is an great acknowledgement of the public importance of this particular place in society and city, in the State, the Nation and beyond. Franklin Court, including its museum, is situated just off Philadelphia’s Independence Mall and, as we all know, it symbolises 1776 likewise. In retrospective, it is a crucial part of the final stages of a project presented in the built-up to the sesquicentennial of the American Independence.
Sennett’s Interior Streets Set
The images in this gallery come from the archive of Richard Sennett. In his view they show “different strategies for moving people through urban space, and images of the urban forms which enable people to watch others”. It seems to build on the idea of the interior street as posed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, juxtaposed against my arcades study and concept of public interior space and interior urbanism (presented in 2007).
This gallery of images is found at Richard Sennett’s Interior Streets and Arcades Set
[www.richardsennett.com]
All of these images are down-loadable to borrow freely.
CSI Urban Space
Given the changing characteristics of public and private urban spaces, the lecture covers a wide range of city-related topics following a two-folded target. As urban space represents the interface of communication and urban investigations, it is crucial to bring participants nearer to the concept of it, including crossing boundaries. The second part of the lecture block will deal with the role of urban planning in shaping urban space following its redefinition. With this insight, participants would understand the role of urban space and the formal ways of planning it.
The Curse of Bigness
There are some who glorify the state or quality of bigness. This seems to be something characteristic of the modern age – the first hosannas began to resound around the dawn of the metropolis. We see it in the writings of Louis Sullivan and in the statements made by Le Corbusier. They like buildings to be big. Bigness is their quality. The notion of ‘bigness’, as pushed forward more recently by among others Rem Koolhaas, is based on complete disconnection between the interior and the exterior. “Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue”, he thinks. Context – the relationship with the building’s surroundings – is supposedly irrelevant. Nonsense! His theorem is contradicted by studies of existing cases. When a building exceeds a certain size and becomes a large-scale structure, public interiors are created. The increase in the number of people using both these indoors and the outdoor space links big buildings closely to their surroundings, more then do small-scale buildings, and thus far from being isolated, big buildings become more connected. In their urban environments, the interaction becomes visible and multi-level or privately-owned public space is created within big buildings. New public interiors extend the outdoor network and thereby give the building a fine-meshed structure. In essence, as the interiors become more public, the small scale is introduced into the building. The building may be big purely in terms of size, but in many ways it is quite as diverse as any part of the city.
On Public Interior Space
In the city today, we meet in public atria and shop in malls, we move along covered walkways and go from street to street by taking shortcuts through the buildings of a city block. In recent decades, the amount and proportion of public space within urban buildings has steadily increased, with much of it forming part of a larger interior and exterior pedestrian network. Yet, although interior public space has become an important constituent of the contemporary city and of our urban experience, it is rarely designed as such. Prompted by this disconnection, Maurice Harteveld has followed different leads to examine contemporary urban design in relation to public interiors. Through this research, he has documented in particular the urban analyses and architectural designs of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in which interior public space is accorded significant and multiple roles. Ideas pioneered by Venturi and Scott Brown have become absorbed within architectural practice, notably their use of the Nolli Map introduced in their 1972 study of Las Vegas. Similarly, the concept of the ‘rue interieur’ seen in their earliest projects, has matured in their later work to include an internal street imbedded in a network of urban public spaces and pathways, both interior and exterior. However, although they refer to interior public space frequently in their writing, Venturi and Scott Brown have yet to describe their views on it in any great detail; a more focused examination that the following dialogue between Maurice Harteveld and Denise Scott Brown seeks to provide.
Design of Public Space
The design of the public space is one of the fundamental assignments for professionals involved in urban design and planning. Constructing and (re)forming the network of public space is even conditional for any kind of urbanity. It includes more than just the lay-out and beauty of spaces, as the design of public space has to be able to facilitate new kinds of usage, preconditioning any plausible development of multiple and complex use, and in general housing the dynamics for social change and exchange.
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Viva Las Vegas
In explorations of the notions of public space, public interiors are generally seen as undemocratic and more private spaces. This is based on the Roman distinction between publicus and privatus, but making public space, as a public case, refer primarily to res publica. – On the other hand, there is a related Roman public law that deals with the common interest of urban society, and could include cases of interior public space. Most sociological research in contemporary daily life reveals these spaces as public. For urbanism, this research can be seen as the social context, because the urbanist is primarily focused on the city: the civitas, and not the whole societas. More specifically, for urban designers who deal with public space, it traditionally means focusing on the outdoor space, and although this is almost always synonymous with the public domain or publicly owned space, I believe that public space can be more than this. For urbanism this means there is a need for new understanding and an extension of the design task..