Absorbing Kai Tak
Authors
Citation
Hinge, v.70, 2000, pp. 70-72
Abstract
What to do with Kai Tak? Proposals and schemes have been tossed and turned, simmered and stirred for what seems like an age. It's been almost three years since the airport relocated. While ideas such as flea markets, a central park, and a pollution-free city have been sounded out, it appears that interest is waning. However, recently a group of architecture students from Berlin attempted to bring Kai Tak back into focus.
Entitled "Hong Kong Visions - Planning the Old Kai Tak Airport", the design workshop was initiated by Barbara Kaiser, a practising architect who also teaches and conducts research at the Technical University Berlin. The design studio was conducted with third and forth year students at the Habitat Unit in the University's Department of Architecture during the winter of 1998-1999 and the results were exhibited at the Goethe Institute in Hong Kong earlier this year.
The parallel contexts of the two cities was seen as an important perspective - both symptomatic of a globalising world, and economies that are not only exploring new spaces and rearranging the city/regional limits and national borders where new cultural and political identities are generated. The studio was divided into two phases - the first was an urban design scenario for the naked area, whilst the second phase entailed designing a housing project for 2,000 habitants within the urban master plan. A total of 18 students worked on the project which began with preparatory research on Hong Kong, focusing on cultural and climatic aspects, housing policy and planning standards, urban infrastructure as well as the history of housing in the region.
The first encounter between the students and the proposed site eventually took place during a study trip to Hong Kong in January 1999. Besides the site investigation, students were shown several housing projects in Hong Kong spanning from the very beginnings of public housing schemes to some of the newest public and private prototypes. Their drawings and models have helped reinvent Kai Tak in infinite identities, from the classical modern urban and architectural position, to ideas of a sustainable city, and a utopia promoting co-existence and the interlacing of nature and city.
(1) Split Level House
by Helge Baumann, Andrea Krenn and Elke Seidel
(2) Transcending form Continent to Water
by Sabine Muth and Heike Speckter
(3) Town Pie
by Tobias Neumann, Leonie Labukt and Joao de Campos Cruz
(4) Water City
by Sophie Peters
(5) High Rise that Differs
by Jorg Schmidt
Description
Subject
Type
Article
Format
Date
2000
Language
en