1. Street stalls
A street stall—a small
dark green structure, a couple of steel bars rooted in cement, a makeshift
construction somewhere between architecture and furniture.
In
the 1970s, the government has licensed more than 50,000 stalls to vendors. The extensive application
of street stalls have given a specific
character to the streets of Hong Kong.
Continuous rows of
hawker stalls divide the street longitudinally into three distinct sections,
which not only have greatly increased the commercial value of
streets, but also have provided unexpected public recreational
space to the community residents.
2. Gap architecture
The limitations of urban area and the expansion of the population provided every inch of urban space in Hong Kong the possibility of redefinition.The temporary restaurants in the lane, locksmiths
store in the stair case, house property intermediary company on the street corner, the attic built on the balcony. Most
of them are the illegal structures desired to survive in the gap space. They are part of
external urban space and constantly change the existing city appearance.
Compared with the ‘pet
architectures’ in Tokyo, the construction condition of the gap architectures in
SSP is worse and their volume is smaller. They are not only built in the ground
level, but also developed toward vertical direction. It is hard to call them ‘pet’, because they normally
show strong will to survive rather than quiet and peaceful like a lovely tiny animal.
The gap architectures are the direct products of
daily life. Although they usually are ugly,
temporary, cheap, were abandoned at will, also be regarded as foreign matters be banned and eradicated, they like the vine plant continuously have filled the city space, and transformed the
existing building facades. In some way, they can be called ‘heterotopias’ as
the theory of David Grahame Shane,
which is the most important part of post-modernism city.
3. This is SSP
Through using the
research method introduced in the book made
in Tokyo, we began to slow down
and appreciated these urban informality (street stalls,
temporary restaurant in the back alleys, illegal housing between the buildings).
They normally give a priority to stubborn honesty in response to their
surroundings and programmatic requirements, without insisting on architectural
aesthetic and form. They seem to me to be better than anything designed by
architects because they produced by residents or the city itself.
Different from the single
buildings, informal structures is by-product of citizens’ daily life，which
can really and directly reflect the characters of a area. They together made up
a physical continuous spatial urban
network.
By collecting and
aligning them in urban opening by taking photographs and making drawings, the
nature of an urban space might become apparent. Meanwhile, we are able to
imagine how the area have been developed 。We
become eyewitness of urban change. After documented various materials that are
adapted to the social and urban texture, it is easy to speak out what is SSP
and how it developed throughout the time.
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