A_HK-SZ BIENNALE (香港深圳雙年展)

Night and Day_HKSZ :: The Crisis Fronts Sampler
Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2009

http://www.flickr.com/photos/normalprojects/sets/72157623098376430/
www.crisisfronts.org/hksz

The primary site of inquiry for the project is the Closed Area interstitial border zone immediately opposite the boundary between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, a zone that is at once largely empty and traversed by thousands of people every day through a vast and intricate managerial flow. It is a zone that is fluxual and intensely managed by infrastructure. In the context of the increasing inter-connectivity of the two cities and the transition from Special Administrative status in 2046. It is also a political and territorial gray area, a region that is at once part of a geographic center of a combined or linked regional metropolis, and at the same time a zone of shared and overlapping peripheries.

Perhaps even more so than the iconic and exploding skylines of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the border is the true emblem of the broader metropolitan region. But its architecture is diffuse, its protocols rigid, and its contrasts of scale, speed, and time extreme. It is an amalgam of contrasts: a territory of agreement, coupled with an infrastructure of quarantine and separation, aquaculture and wetlands with duty free shopping. Already the site of dense development catering to transients and frequent commuters, the border has also proven to be a zone subject to great expansion as well as one with a tremendous gravity and attraction – a space more than a line.

These are conditions that provide the basis for a series of protocols and logics sampled from the border area. Our proposal suggests that the border might be thought to be increasingly populated and densified while at the same time devising mechanisms to preserve and redistribute existing land uses and practices within the border zones which are themselves fragile and ecologically necessary.

The project itself is a loose parametric infrastructural and organizational framework. Our aim to find opportunities to seed the landscape and the infrastructure with new urban protocols for the border region having to do with leisure, agriculture, water purification and remediation, energy harvesting, and civic exchange. The proposed infrastructure is generated based on initial organizational and relational protocols and will evolve over the duration of the Biennale as visitors respond and add information to inflect it.

Visitors are encouraged to sample from the printed souvenir postcards, which are printed with portions of an online questionnaire querying practices with respect to travel and communication between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. The intent here is to forecast possible urban infrastructural arrangements based on the sampling of a population’s latent attitude towards the uncertainty of a future collective identity. This intersection is fertile ground to accommodate the imminent demands of various boundary transformations of the near future.

One possible scenario of this begins with the expansion and proliferation of the zones of delay that occur along existing transit corridors and border crossing points. These are already zones programmed with commerce and could become the core around which new pockets of time and territory will percolate and coalesce. The proposed infrastructural framework is implemented to ease the displacement of vital wetland and agricultural territories as the zones of delay are extended into the surrounding landscape. This displacement constitutes a dynamic front - a turbulent region that is interspersed with a collection of agricultural patches that fluctuate between wet and dry on a seasonal basis and are connected by a series of circulatory linkages that promote a more extended duration of occupation.

As visitor data is added the infrastructure will grow and further differentiate as it acquires and remixes protocols and practices sampled from the Crisis Fronts studio.



Project Team: Michael Chen, Jason Lee, Cole Reynolds, Tai Li Lee, Roy Zhuang

Fabrication: Edwin Shum, Model-Tech (HK) Ltd.

Web Interface: Bob Holling, Studio Holling

Support is provided by Pratt Institute School of Architecture and the Pratt Institute Faculty Development Fund.


Events:

Biennale Opening Forum “Cultural Education / Bi-City Exchange”, December 4th, 2:00 – 3:00pm, at the Main Pavilion.

BYOB x DETOUR Pecha Kucha Night, a crossover event between the Biennale and DETOUR 2009 (organized by Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design), December 5, 5:00-7:00pm, at the Police Married Quarters, Hollywood Road

Additional images by:

Jose Blanco, Joanna Cheung, Andres Correa, Ivan Delgado, Nick Garrate, Allison Hoffman, Heidi Jandris, Kamilla Litvinov, Sebastian Misiurek, Jeos Oreamuno Jun Pak, Anna Perelman, Cole Reynolds, Bradley Rothenberg, John Seward, Jintana Tantinirundr

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註：我負責的部分是箱子組裝的初稿、一些地圖跟圖表的繪製還有翻譯，裝置的概念以及組裝程序由導師Michael Chen與Jason Lee指導，另外還有排版跟明信片的Cole Reynolds以及圖表的Roy Zhuang