Reï¼?fabricating City

Now I will walk you through the feature exhibitions. Beginning with two exhibition blocks “Mapping Fabric� and “Building fabric� around the front courtyard plaza, be invited to walk across interconnecting bridges and platforms into the exhibition “Networking City� and “Modeling Hong Kong,� and later to the second courtyard, formerly a prisoner’s playground, showing the “Transforming Fabric� and “Envisioning Fabric� exhibitions. Despite the big and comprehensive themes, the merit of these series of exhibition is to purposefully locate the visitors in the middle of the experience of the city, to present the diversity of architectural and urban strategies towards the city’s revitalization by local architects. Besides, also included in the experience are urban precedents from other places such as Nanjing and Beijing, two big cities that also have undergone the far-reaching rapid change, possible to be applied to this Hong Kong and Shenzhen. Moreover, one of the most attractive idea from the organizer is the “Urban Void Hong Kong,� in which eight Chinese architects are invited to present their virtually design for the in this city “out of a tabura lasa.� However, most of the eight designs avoided physical building or urban designs, instead trying to present future’s new typologies of buildings that are too virtual to actually inspire local visitors and give rise to solutions of this city’s sustainable development.

Exhibition utilizing the existing prisons.

Being a historical compound under Hong Kong local conservation-preservation law, the Central Police Station complex is quite a unique venue for the Biennale. Having been protected and added to the Hong Kong conservation plan since 1995, the compound had been at the center of attention of the Biennale’s curatorial teams, who wanted to explored ways to revitalize the utility of these historical buildings under, of course, the pressure of local activists who demonstrated against it. The venue consists of the police station and the jail together is itself contradictory yet exactly provided what the curatorial team wanted: the mixing type of buildings old and new, fabrics that connects city in past and future. Most of the exhibition rooms – previously existing police office, dormitory rooms and prison cells – have been re-decorated for the exhibition use. As we know republishing such fixed-function to a flexible space could never be an easy job, especially with these idiosyncratic constraints, say, the individual prison cell was smaller than 4 square meters that has been later on turned into exhibitions from design schools. In this particular case, I feel that the definition of mixing-space is interpreted critically than ever. While some of the cells have been covered with folded texture to define “new spaces,� some were turned into showrooms for fashion design. Those various and amazing existing spaces not only provides the exhibition rooms, but are also themselves exhibits that shows the audience a mixed-view of the history and the presence of present, art and practice, pureness and ugliness. What is more, academic efforts are involved more than ever in these exhibitions. A great amount of exhibition works from design schools’ chairs and professors, together with the work of their students are inspirational and imaginational. The most exciting one to me goes to the exhibition “Wandering Homes� by Environment and Interior design students of Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which explores alternative living solutions to provide home for homeless people and reflects this homeless phenomenon in Hong Kong by means of installation of shelters, photographs and videos. These designs by the students were highly compatible and even more interesting than the ones by architects.

Meanwhile, the compound’s front courtyard was efficiently and wisely renovated with the least damage of the existing condition with preservation concepts. Bamboo, as a common environmentally friendly material utilized as pragmatic scaffolds all over the island of Hong Kong, is used for most of the installation structure, with the fast-made joints tied with rubber strings. Moreover, this material is also used in the back courtyard turning a cold and scary prisoners’ playground into a friendly back plaza. However, whether or not it is the intention of the organizers, the first impression the Biennale gives to its visitors is too much like a construction site: the installation of bamboo at the entrance, and between buildings were too rough, plus, the bamboo covers up the historical beauty of the existing walls en bloc.

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Hao Ruan is a graduate student in architecture at Tsinghua University in Beijing and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He is interested in the different contemporary stages of architectural development and design practices concerned in China and around the world.