Universals VIII

Ideal Type

At the age of 27, when I was engaged on large-scale housing schemes for a big German industrial concern, I used my free time to draw all Palladio’s plans on thirty standard sheets of paper (size 420/594) in a common scale. This work on Palladio prompted me to design my first housing scheme, the Freidorf estate (built 1919-1921), on the modular system of an architectural order. By means of this system all the external spaces (squares, streets, gardens) and all public internal spaces (school, restaurant, shop, meeting rooms) were laid out in an artistic pattern which would be perceived by those living there as the spatial harmony of proportion.

Hannes MeyerHannes Meyer, “How I work,” in Architectura CCCP, Nr. 6, 1933, Moscow

Intro

Continuing a series of studios titled Universals, this iteration will be concerned with architectures fundamentally ambivalent condition of pertaining both to a specific condition and being embedded in a universal, disciplinary discussion. This Janus-faced state of both looking to the specific and general will serve as the productive dualism when developing an ideal public architecture and situating it in a complex urban, political and economic condition in Hong Kong.

Background

Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand developed theories of the ideal types of architecture in his lecture series Précis of 1813, outlining an encyclopaedic architecture for the enlightened world. Concurrently as he is developing his universal language of architecture at Ecole Polytechnique, large socio-political processes such as colonialism and the massive expansion of the metropolis were happening outside the windows. While city planning in the eighteenth was more in the domain of urban engineering as in the case of Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Herein lies a possible unresolved tension between ´type´, the general expansion of the contemporary metropolis and the relationship between universality and the specific.

Étienne-Louis Boullée can serve as a key to understand a relation between typology and architecture with his civic buildings, outlining the metropolis by a series of paradigmatic civic monuments. Boulle also redefined the meaning of the monument as he expanded the definition from meaning a monument such as a tomb, commemorative element, into a monumental public architecture as we can see in his Metropolitan Church (1782), Cénotaphe à Newton (1784) and Deuxieme projet pour la Bibliothèque du Roi (1785).

One can interpret Boullée´s late work as a contribution to a visionary idea of the metropolis, where public space takes on monumental scale. Boullée did propose a total idea of the city, he proposed large incisions into an existing fabric and through them a reordering of the city around these public buildings.

Half a century later, with similar grand ambitions for a public common, Giedion, Leger and Sert would formulate a 9-point manifesto, arguing the freedom monumentality can give to the architect in fostering an architecture beyond program.

Project

The project will be to develop an ideal public building in the first part of the semester together with studies of relevant precedents. We will challenge the ideal type developed with a site in Hong Kong, providing topographic, political and economic complexity to the project. 

We will delve into buildings of the city which are neither capricious nor urbane and aim to develop civic architecture which has the ambition synthesizing a public ambition into a whole, forming a space for the collective imagination, precisely not ´iconic´. We will develop projects addressing the public appropriate for the 21st century.

As primitives of the new technological era, we will work from within the discipline of architecture harbouring both an understanding of architecture as an ancient discipline and a fascination for the new world, developing an architecture which serves as landing strips for dust, motes, light and shadow.

Site

The site will be Hong Kong, the par excellence contemporary city built from one type. Hong Kong also serves as a paradigmatic example of a dense, complex city with a history embedded in colonialism, global trade and with current relationships to both China and the West.

Since the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 Hong Kong has been embedded in this predicament of belonging both to the East and the West. The city's main source of revenue was income from being an entrepôt harbor and quickly became a financial center. Late 19th century came the first factories and manufacturing increased with industries such as sugar refining, cement and ice factories.

The interwar period brought financial difficulties for Hong Kong, due largely to turbulent times in China and the Great Depression in the United States. Hong Kong was industrialized at a much larger scale from the 1950´s because of embargos related to the Korean War lead Hong Kong away from being a entrepot harbour to a manufacturing city. From 1946 to 1948, the number of factories increased by 1211 and 81,700 workers employed in the manufacturing sector. Kwun Tong Industrial Estate was the first industrial estate where clothes manufacturing took place. Also, industries from China moved to Hong Kong because of the Chinese Civil War.

From the 1970 the economy was booming with more than 16 000 factories and its employees accounting for 40% of Hong Kong employment. The electronics, clothing and textile industries grew rapidly due to technical innovations in those fields and manufacturing accounted for 30% of the GDP.

But in the late 1970´s and the 1980´s the industries started to move out of Hong Kong and into Mainland China. There were several reasons for this, some being labour cost, more lenient environmental regulations and lower land costs.

What replaced the exodus of these industries from Hong Kong was financial services, tourism, trading and logistics, and professional and producer services which is still the current economy of the city.