museum on the street.

another scene at Lee Tung Street, Wanchai, Hong Kong

if you want to study the history of a city, the best to do, other than spending days and nights at the library to read thru books is to visit it, walk the streets, taste the local food, study the buildings in the vicinity. well...this is how you would do when you visit any European cities. The buildings define the character and stand as a silent witness to the history of a city.

on the other hand, to catch up with time, it is also inevitable to redevelop the city especially when the pace of the economy is moving so fast...

hang on, is that really the case?

can the preservation of the city fabric coexists with the new developments?

Disappearing City

always wonder why do we need to tear down so much of our old district. from the economic perspective, this might be the easiest way of getting revenues for the government. the people were furious with the tax increase, value added tax...and the politicians went hysterical when the slight mention of the cutting of social benefits was heard...now there is a limitation as to how the government can generate revenues for all the social expenses, and one such way is to sell off land to the developers, thereby receiving land premium in return, creating more jobs by demolishing what is there, and building something entirely new through the employment of different trades of the construction industry. Of course, even if the selling off of the land is inevitable, the government can still organise architectural competitions in order to find the best solution based on a design perspective rather than purely from the financial point of view.

on the other hand, when we are complaining why the government has to tear down one after another old city fabric, we also have to ask ourselves, are we prepared to do more?

you can not create something out of nothing, it is about how much you are willing to trade.

***fictional writing below***

another sleepless night...

for weeks, the city has been under a blanket of haze, whether these were the result of consecutive days of high humidity or an omen of things to come, i did not know.

days ago, found this letter inside the mailbox addressed to a former occupant of the apartment i stayed. yes, a real letter! these days, what one would normally find in the mailbox were only bills that you ought to pay months ago, promotion leaflets telling you how slim you ought to, or from apparent charitable organization demanding you to pay up in order to save lives from the third world (only that if they didn't print the leaflets in colour, God knows how much they would have saved!). so to find a letter in the post box with handwritten writings came as a surprise.

there were a few things peculiar with this letter. First of all, the letter was addressed to, as mentioned, a former occupant of the apartment, which to my knowledge, was a loner for most of his life, and most important of all, was assumed dead years ago. I had limited deatils of the story, but rumours has it that during a trip to the mountains, he fell off the cliff, and nobody heard from him since...and that was twenty years ago. the other intersting aspect of this letter was that it did not have the sender's name but only an address. the address was in an old part of the city, deserted many months ago, and waiting to be taken down. yet, the postmark was recent, and more importantly, i have not seen handwriting of such calligraphic quality for a long time. if you held the envelope close enough, you could almost smell the distinctive character of the ink. and while doing so, there was the presence of a slight hint of light, ever so faint, but sweet perfume.

with the envelope in hand, i pondered on what to do with this. to send it back to the post office would only mean throwing it into the incinerator as it was a known fact that those building were to be torn down soon.

i decided to pay a visit to this place.

grabbed my torch and overcoat, i left my apartment in the middle of the night...

the day the clock stopped

on 12th November 2006, after serving for almost half a century, the Star Ferry Pier was to be closed down, soon to be demolished and make way for new roads, more commercial ventures.

while not trying to deal with the political issues here, there's always the question of whether the demolition can be avoided, and instead of an entirely new project, like our counterparts in the rest of the world, maintain part of the structure, and transform it to some other use. Financially, the startup cost would definitely be more, but it is exactly these city fabric that defines the character of our city, and in many overseas examples, they become some very succesful self-sustaining projects.

a trip on the Ferry was always a nice break from the chaotic city life, and to some, almost an everyday habit. now that the new pier, modeled in a very much "fake" exterior, is shifted so far out, its significance to the city and its dwellers will never be the same.

more photos can be found in our http://www.flickr.com/photos/adlab/ site.