Stratagems in Architecture Hong Kong in Venice

Our society is constantly evolving since its existence. For decades, Hong Kong has been dominated by progressive development to sustain our city’s economic growth, from a fishing village to a light industrial city, and eventually became one of the top financial cities in the world. For generations, economical progression became the golden rule of success and it is the largest driving force to move forward. “Social Fact” is a term created by the father of sociologist Emile Durkheim as to indicate the social patterns that are external to individuals. Social facts can be social norms, moral values, customs, conventions, rules and other social structures exist outside individuals. At the basis of the term lies the perception of the individual grossly conditioned by social realities that form the “Boundaries of Acceptable Behavior”, but these boundaries are not static. Each generation will derive their own set of norms and values based on their particular social practice. For our new generation, the moral value is shifting from progressive development to reflexive, more concern on civil society, civil right, minority interest, fairness, localisation, social enterprise, and sustainable life, and that forms the bottom-line of the new generation. In some areas, this bottom-line is collided with the current “Boundaries of Accepted Behavior”. It creates the condition for the changes. Mary Douglas further explained these changes as breaking of rules or norms by looking for “Binary Opposition and Possibilities”, the rule breakers are standing at the liminal stage or have already gone beyond them. All margins are dangerous, if they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any system of ideas is vulnerable at its boundary, it is our “Frontier”, as know as the “Battleground”. Each of our young exhibitors is unique and having their own characteristics on architectural design or art creation withthe new moral value and they are the new driving force of our society. They understand the latest trend and are equipped with advance technology. During their practice as an architect or an artist, they are consistently facing difficulties with their creation in order to survive. In response to our curatorial statement regarding the definition of our “Frontier” [Battleground], they will be looking into the Thirty-Six Stratagems and select one stratagem to demonstrate how he or she would succeed in their own battleground at the frontier of architecture or art. We want to hear their stories and their approach to the social responsibility, by reducing the gap between the private demands and public needs in the field of architecture and art. The ancient Chinese war strategies are often referring to modern business strategies and published not only in China but translated into foreign languages and published worldwide as bestsellers. The Thirty-Six Stratagems [ 三十六計 ] was a Chinese essay used to illustrate a series of stratagems used in politics, war, and civil interaction. The Thirty-Six Stratagems are divided into a preface, six chapters containing six stratagems each, and an afterword. The first three chapters generally describe tactics for use in advantageous situations, whereas the last three chapters contain stratagems that are more suitable for disadvantageous situations. Each proverb is accompanied by a short comment, no longer than a sentence or two that explains how the said proverb is applicable to military tactics. These thirty-six Chinese proverbs are related to thirty-six battle scenarios in Chinese history and folklore, predominantly of the Warring States Period and the Three Kingdoms Period. The Thirty-Six Stratagems consists of 6 chapters and each chapter consists of 6 stratagems; Chapter 1: Winning Stratagems [ 勝戰計 ], Chapter 2: Enemy Dealing Stratagems [ 敵戰計 ], Chapter 3: Attacking Stratagems [ 攻戰計 ], Chapter 4: Chaos Stratagems [ 混戰計 ], Chapter 5: Proximate Stratagems [並戰計] and Chapter 6: Desperate Stratagems [敗戰計].

Standardisation is a product of modernism, a tool to boost economic growth and ensure a fast pace of development. It brought us into a new era some 50 years ago. However, in view of the fast-paced of design and construction today, people follow the standard without further thought most of the time. The standard sometimes becomes a can product and cannot deal with the individual specific needs of the users. Standardisation aims at designing for everyone. It designs to suit everyone but no one satisfied. A design for all is a design for none. Standardisation nullifies the relation between the user and the designers. The “Architecture” in Hong Kong is an illustration of standardisation. These standards are the products of economic and marketing decisions, but seldom from the point of the welfare of the users. These standards are the frontier that architects must cross to promote a healthier and more responsible architecture.In this exhibition, we try to break away from this standardization. Starting from a cube, from a standard block, we demonstrate how this block can be customized to suit the needs of the users and the architecture itself. It is based on a villa project of the exhibitor. Through the use of architecture, we establish again the relation between the users and the designers.

In Hong Kong, extremely high land price drives design for the absolute maximum in profitability from the developer’s perspective. The efficiency rate of the property, which means the ratio of saleable area to gross floor area, is the pre-dominating grading index in the property industry. Higher efficiency the layout, more competence the architect is. Somehow, individual owners do agree on this only index and have little concern on physical livability. Sustainability is somehow perceived as a trendy fashion, and even a good-to-have or optional item. How can we stand on the frontier to bargain yet not to compromise livability & sustainability against efficiency and profitability in design for all buildings not only green architecture? Design has no limitation. To a certain extent, however, some government restrictions give bargaining power to architects to fight for more green against efficiency and profitability. Once livability and sustainability is a mandate, there is more room for green movement. Enjoyable green, abundant daylight and naturally-ventilated air are essential for health and well-being. Such provisions shall be pre-requisite rather than marginalized in high-density, high-rise built environment or gimmicky in green buildings. The next frontier of green architecture shall be advocated, including a new set of Practice Notes for Architects’ Pre-emption (PNA’P) - Advocacy (ADV).

 Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated places in the world. It is not rare to see an aged building next to a new building. And some of the buildings are getting aged, but it does not mean those buildings need to be demolished and rebuilt, as they are already bound to the society and the culture. If we demolish those aged buildings, we are not physically destroying the building only, we are also destroying the culture of the city. In this situation, maybe renovation of buildings is a good option. Renewing those aged buildings and extending their life is just like extending the diary of the culture for our children. Just like the stratagem 14 in the 36 stratagems of the Chinese, “Raise a Corpse from the Dead”, which takes an institution, a technology, a method, or even an ideology that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for your own purpose. It is an idea to revive something from the past by giving it a new purpose, bringing an old idea, custom or tradition to life, and reinterpreting them to fit your purposes.

The significance of the curatorial statement from Alejandro Aravena lies in the enlightenment of the civic public and their contribution as a collective effort to call for changes to some as given living conditions, which are exemplified in the making of new architecture scenes. The responsive curatorial statement from the Hong Kong Curatorial Team looks into the phenomena from a societal point of view, and highlights the different struggle by metaphorically citing the Chinese fighting wisdom “36 Stratagems”. This exhibition is a documentation of the project Viva Blue House in Wan Chai, Hong Kong. The story tells not only the architectural renovation to a cluster of worn-out historical residential buildings, but more importantly, the changes in the attitudes, values, judgments, and self- empowerment of the original residents to strive for a chance of staying in their original place, despite the external forces from the government bodies to expel them out with her plan to make the place to a tourist attraction spot. It was 2007. The collective voice consists of the tenants, social workers, academic professions, architects, planners, writers, artists, and many citizens who care about this issue. They successfully lodged objections to the government’s plan. A year later, the government launched the ‘Partnership Scheme for the Revitalisation & Adaptive Reuse of Historical Buildings’, and subsidized the appropriate non-profit-making organisation to run the project with social enterprise programs. I was in the fighting team with the tenants since 2007, and had the honor of being invited to do the architectural design proposal for them.
The renovation site works started in 2012 and it was anticipated to complete by end of 2016. The exhibit shown here is a miniature shop front of the ‘House of Stories’ in the G/F of the Blue House where the neighbors celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival every year.

Extreme living conditions of high density have been imposing great pressure on daily life and created non-stop argument between government policies and citizens’ expectation. It leads to social laceration which may possibly originate in distorted living created by extreme capitalist visions. The distortion manipulates our concept of time and space which keep us urging for achieving new extreme in both physical and mental, especially those who have lower income. For instance, a usual bedroom for partitioned space ( 板間房 ) of low income people is about 1900mm x 1500mm, which is a basic unit for the purpose of sleeping, as well as a measurement of social status and stages of life for the middle class. In high-rise residential tower, habitant concerns how smart they could extend 500mm of the bed from bay window and re-level it with a storage platform at 500mm(H). Those living adaption for sleeping on “bay window” is a commonplace of family scenes and has become a “bedroom norm” of a blessed family. Since Hong Kong people are too adaptive for confined space and used to create flexible solutions, they kept overcoming problems and adjusting solutions in different period of time for tackling difficult circumstances imposed to them, in the meanwhile, we seem to have forgotten the inherent quality of living which we deserve.  The installation extracts the concept of partitioned space of low income people and turns it into a new partitioned spatial concept which can separate and integrate spaces to create an unlimited quality. Partitions can collapse and open up space for interaction. Local wisdom can be seen from the vibrant streetscape in Hong Kong which find great possibilities from limited space Sometimes, the interactive scenes show certain spatial beauty as same as a poem, which create great imagination with limited words and spatial setting. Could you experience the wisdom of poetic space within the limited space of 2.75 sqm? It may be a new dimension facing the problem of limitation, expanding our imagination and giving unlimited quality for such limitation facing by high density living.

“Bless me, father, for I have sinned; this is my first confession” <first confession> by Frank O’Connor. During our lengthy architectural education, often we were taught that the fundamental role of an architect is to help shape our city and to build shelter for the public. They are the guardians to safeguard the equilibrium between public space and private development to maintain social harmony. In reality, most architectural graduates work for established firms. And in our monotonous commercial driven society, the choice of project nature is often narrow. Therefore as an employee, they are being assigned with projects that are in contradiction to the ideology they have learned at school, such as “designing wall effect buildings”, “developing small and dense living units” or even “demolishing historical buildings with
a lower grading”. These tasks require architects to act against their own conscience and violate their principles, in the long run, sins will be accumulated. In order to survive as a sinner, they need to hide their moral as described in Stratagem 27, ‘Play Dumb While Remaining Smart’, because opportunity will eventually come and rescue their soul. One way to get rid of our sin is the Sacrament of Penance, also commonly known as confession. By means of confession, it is where individual man or woman may confess sins committed after baptism and have them absolved by a priest within the Confession Box, the confessional. The First Confession is a confessional that is formed
by layers of metal bunk beds as to mimic the extracted façade of a small and dense residential tower. The layout of our Confessional is a simplified version of a cathedral with a porch, a nave and a chapel. Architects are encouraged to confess their sins toward the sky alone within the uncovered Chapel.

What does it mean to be poor living in Hong Kong, and whose business is it anyway? On display is the financial record and daily-life mess of DOMAT, a not-for-profit architecture practice working with poor communities in Hong Kong. This self-aware act is a reversal of the expected exposure of the living condition of the poor people themselves - why would we display their most intimate condition, but not our own? The exhibit discusses some of the difficulties that these people are facing due to their social and economic situation, and how, due to the lack of affordable housing options, we as architects may act. In the process we may consider: •  How do we observe and understand the conditions and people that we are dealing with? •  How do we reflect and evaluate?

For many years, Hong Kong inherited a habit of urban development that emphasizes “forget the past and look for the future”. The scene of taking down historical buildings or villages in order to allow “economic development” is repeating constantly, many of us witnessed the history of Hong Kong and share collective memories. Social values are hooked up to money, and often labeled with price tags. Architecture is a carrier that breeds different life and stories while recording the transformation of the context. The core value of architecture is in the space, in the function, and in the history. These values enhance the significance of every piece of architecture. It should
not be valued only on the beauty of form, popularity or commercial value. In this exhibition, I will focus in my ancestor house located in the rural area of New Territories in Hong Kong. It may not have history of centuries, but it was once an established fish farm. The place has been through ups and downs of Hong Kong over 40 years and inherited 3 generations. I will pick out evidence of history and true stories that witness the transformation of this beautiful city. Memory Tanks is an installation comprising 150 small fish tanks recovered from the storage of my ancestor house. These tanks were the primary tools for fish breeding of certain species, which were then sold around the world. I reinterpret these tanks into memory tanks that hold and breed different stories and memories recovered from around the place and they could be inherit to the future generations. “Understanding the past and look for the future.” My frontier is a mental battle against this distorted
moral practice of Money Talks taking over our society.
I would like to apply my architectural perspective to make a record of stories and history of the ancestor house and its context through photography and videography,
as the introduction of North East New Territories New Development in 2008 may soon see the Long Valley wetland area redeveloped.

Hong Kong is a city that has always been at the ‘frontier’ to face a particular ‘battle’ – the lack of inhabitable space and its consequential spatial complexity. Considering the cityʼs density and issues of privacy and intimacy, Hong Kong can be seen as an urban laboratory for future compact cities. The point of departure is to explore the scale and scope of the hyper-densified and complicated area as alternative dimensions in the urban fabric of
Sham Shui Po. Sham Shui Po has been labelled as one of the poorest districts in HK. The area and its hyper-densed apartment typologies developed in Hong Kong since the 1950ʼs- focusing on how life unfolds inside. It is compact, complex, complicated, yet highly diversified. It has a high mix of inhabitants, ranging from grassroots locals, mainland immigrants, Southeast Asian groups, to many other ethnic groups. In this hybrid community, people have conceived countless ways to deal with the constraints and parameters. Their adaptation starts from spatial poverty, then shifts to spatial negotiation and re-interpretation, finally generates spatial diversity and re-invention. Many spatial surgeries we found in this unique urban scene is innovative and imaginative.  Part of the exercise is to map and convey the habitual infrastructures of the inhabitants’ lives – based on the theme of spatial poverty and spatial diversity. Through revealing all these hidden spatial agenda to a larger scale of social infrastructures and developing new typologies for spatial adaptation, this piece of work aims to demonstrate how the Hong Kong-ers have always turned the physical limitations into inspirational spatial inventions. This endurance and turnover, we call it ‘Verso’ ( 反客為主 ).

The Beauty Trap [美人計], takes a battlefield of consciousness, straightly hitting contradictory aesthetics and values of humanity to reflect oneself. Regarding beauty of architecture, is that why architecture develop knowledge of climate and light while humans fundamentally need air and the sun? In modern cities, everywhere is the battle of climate
and light. Humans adopt, alter or forge wind and light, between natural and artificial experiences, creating a comfortable living environment which matches modernistic standards. In the process of nature being civilized, we repetitively question about the meanings of life. What aesthetics should we pursuit? What values? Are they ultimate and eternal? A wooden planet is placed in the center of downtown where most pedestrians walk by. The planet is constantly painted. As the paint is dried by unique wind direction resulting from the screen like towers, a nail will be hammered at the last pad of drying paint each time. The nails are then stitched, forming typhoon shelters and creating oceans. The oceans trigger human activities and cities growing.Searching for light followed by wind and water, this project plans to visit different malls or commercial buildings, through clear glass, looking and filming the midday sky along with the arcs of architectural structure will be combined as the sun.  Screen-like buildings, arcs of construction and glass of malls define wind and light on such the frontier of architecture. Both modern cities and nature, the general extremes are integrated into a beauty-trap. Hidden true intentions behind obsequiousness juxtapose so-called symbols of natural superficial features. Then, can it let humans to retrieve and look into variety of values and choices of methods, to obtain the final victory?

Nowadays in Hong Kong, increasing housing cost for
city dwellers become inevitable due to the unbalanced demand and supply of public housing provision. The economic problem will give rise to further reduction in living space or necessity of accommodation in sub-divided units (SDUs) for the low and middle income groups. While the government in Hong Kong are developing policy as solutions to expedite the production of public housing and controlling the residential property price, we as general public may also look for other pragmatic measures to improve our living condition. Back to 1950s, the government provided a subsidized programme for providing mass production of public housing to the low income households. People living in that housing type had limited living space and had to share common facilities like kitchen and washroom with the other households. Many social activities were taken place in common areas like lift lobby, entrance foyer and rooftop space. The inhabitants enjoyed certain degree of social life and entertainment on a shared basis of resources with their neighbours. With reference to the current condition of private SDUs, would it be possible to apply a similar methodology for allowing common areas within the building for sharing among the inhabitants? The promotion of common
social space within private development can be made by relaxing of building control measures. If such motion can be implemented, it will be beneficial to the dwellers in SDUs as they can then free up their private living space from the non-essential functions and therefore have better utilisation of their rental area. From this exhibit, we attempt to explore the possible common space within those residential buildings with sub- divided units and their potential functions. By doing so, the SDU inhabitants will enjoy a wider range of social/ daily activities under the current hostile urban environment.

The work captures different parts of the “City Sky” (Hong Kong 18 districts) as kite shapes. It pulls together the contradiction between the city and the kite, displaying the paradox of coexistence but also opposition between civilisation and nature. These kites are loaded with problems we are facing in our lives , demands, hopes and dreams , through “ kite flying ” in the form of flying in the air, like a detached, a kind of liberation , a conception of returning to nature. It is also a metaphor of military reconnaissance, communications and liaison, rescue and help seeking, like a reflection on urban development, global communication, and a longing for nature. Through this work, it is presenting the existing social carcass and hoping to be looking more in line for people-oriented rather than economic efficiency- oriented urban development.