Learning from Louis Vuitton

Author(s): JONATHAN D. SOLOMON

Source: Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) , March 2010, Vol. 63, No. 2,
Changing Asia (March 2010), pp. 67-70
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Association of Collegiate Schools
of Architecture, Inc.

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Op Arch I
JONATHAN D. SOLOMON
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong is often presented to visitors as a city of
contrasts?East and West local and global. The
official slogan, "Asia's World City/' often paired with
images of junk boats set serenely against
harborfront skyscrapers, supports such oppositional
formulations. The rapid growth of Asian cities in the
past two decades has reinforced this condition
regionally, as the old is effectively superseded by
the often unfamiliar new. In Hong Kong, the
oppositional model is being challenged by a new
politicization of the spaces of global consumption:
shopping malls. Hong Kong malls demonstrate in
their design, their economics, and their occupation
how unique local conditions can be formed within
generic global systems.
Take these three images of a privately owned
public space in a Hong Kong shopping mall called
Times Square: in summer 2009 "Bloc Mickey 28 by
Disney" showcased 50 international artists' hand
painted sculptures of Mickey Mouse in atrium and
seven Mickey-themed sculptures in the plaza
(Figure 1). According to the press release, "the
artists' graffiti artworks in the form of tires,
containers and road blocks can be seen in every
corner of the exhibition, creating a distinctive
ambiance of urban art."1 Indigo Child, an exhibition
by illustrator Carrie Chau featuring a series of
original characters imagined by the Hong Kong
native, appeared in the mall and in shopping bags
in December, 2008 (Figure 2). As advertised in the
Standard, "A limited edition Indigo Child 2009
calendar and Black Sheep soft toy are ready to go
home with shoppers who spend HK$800 at any
shops in Times Square or Food Forum."2 In summer
of 2008, activists wearing shirts that spell out "this
is public space" demonstrate to the consternation
of mall security (Figure 3).
What appear to be three distinct activities?a
global corporation branding public space, a local
artist partnering with a retail group, and local
political demonstration?are in fact manifestations
of the same tension between power and resistance.
Under Hong Kong's Land Lease Law, the developer
67 SOLOMON Journal of Architectural Education,
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Learning from Louis Vuitton
of Times Square, Wharf Holdings, was granted an
extra gross floor area (CFA) of 22,000 sq m in
exchange for providing a 1,347 sq m streetside
plaza for pedestrian passage and passive
recreation.3 Wharf rented out the plaza for private
gain and restricted public use. Following an expos?
by the South Chino Morning Post in 2008, the
government released a list of public facilities within
private properties which were dedicated for public
use, including Times Square.4 After the clarification
of status, the limits of publicity were tested by
activists playing badminton, jumping rope, writing
calligraphy and distributing political leaflets. In
response, Wharf has held a sequence of art
exhibitions in an effort to re-establish control over
the space.5 Both parties are exercising soft power in
an attempt to define public space.6 The ground this
resistance occurs on, shopping malls like Times
Square, are shifting spatially, economically and
culturally. A shift in theory is necessary as well.
In his 2001 Guide to Shopping, Rem Koolhaas,
along with his students and collaborators, makes an
argument for shopping as the agent provocateur of
global homogenization?subverting program,
confounding culture, and catalyzing the generic
city.7 While much of the heady urban development
of the past two decades may be explicated under
Koolhaas's analysis, shopping malls in Hong Kong
stand in stubborn resistance to it. As the example of
Times Square suggests, even the icons of global
empire appear in bespoke form, artistic expression
and consumerism thrive at local and global levels,
and authentic resistance exists.
In the spring of 2009,1 led a graduate seminar
at the University of Hong Kong, Department of
Architecture, in the research and documentation of
the city's shopping malls. We undertook mapping
their spatial, economic, and cultural significance.
Cigi Lau and Joey Yim were of valuable assistance
in the preparation of this research, and Clara Wong
was an indispensible interlocutor. A seed funding
grant from the University of Hong Kong Committee
on Research and Conference Grants funded the
pp. 67-70? 2010 ACSA
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further work. Approaching the project as an
opportunity to criticize Koolhaas's notion of the
generic city and the role that he defined for
shopping malls, we identified in them instead the
gleam of the authentic.
The precedents for this type of critique include
Venturi and Scott Brown's "look downward to go
up" in their 1972 Learning from Las Vegas.8
Kenneth Frampton's notion of critical regionalism as
an "architecture of resistance" from 1983 was
another touchstone for us.9 These texts challenged
international modernism at a time when its power to
explain the world was being questioned by
simultaneous crises in resources, economy and
culture. Today, the notion of the generic city as a
smooth space of global flows unbound from local
difference, a theory often illustrated by the
contemporary Asian city,10 is called into question by
the return of these same crises.
If shopping is Hong Kong's answer to
authenticity, how do we determine the spatial
forgeries from the real? In Hong Kong, a crisis of
consumption is a crisis of identity. It is this identity,
confounding the generic and catalyzing culture, that
we find in the mall, testing the thesis that in the
end it is shopping that has made Hong Kong
unique.
Hong Kong shopping malls are grounds of
resistance, public not by virtue of ownership or of
rights granted by law, but by virtue of the liberty
against global forces practiced within them. We
identified three practices of resistance in our
analysis: spatial, economic, and cultural.
First, shopping malls take on novel spatial
qualities in response to the resistance of context.
These include the transit-oriented podium
developments atop city rail stations which branch
out to their dense surroundings. In Mong Kok, the
densest place on earth, the Langham Place Mall
spirals into a thirteen-story-high corkscrew. The
designs of other malls react to local geographical
and infrastructural constraints. Pacific Place Mall
doubles as a stair connecting the hillside of
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Learning from Louis Vuitton 68

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 4. A model wearing a dress made from Styrofoam netting commonly
used to pack fruits and vegetables poses during an event organized to
protest the demolition of the Graham Street Market, 3 November 2007.
(Photo by Dr. lam Chong Ip.)
5. Foreign domestic workers, largely Filipino, are given a day off by law
every Sunday. With nowhere else to congregate outside of the
extraordinarily small apartments they live and work in during the week,
the Government relaxes enforcement of its laws against loitering to
allow them to encamp on the network of footbridges in Central.
(Photo by Knox Chan and Edwin Law, 2009.)

Hong Kong park with the neighborhood of Wan Chai,

and Admiralty Center connects a government office
complex with commercial towers by bridging over a
bus terminus. Each of these malls demonstrates how
the resistance of Hong Kong's unique spatial
conditions makes generic models specific.
In the central business district, a network of
footbridges developed to link high-end shopping
malls in office tower podiums was developed by
Hong Kong Land beginning in 1993. The bridges
connect more than 40 properties via 7 km of
walkway and 800 m of escalators. The new network
eases access for the young professional class to

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steep, older neighborhoods and has led to
gentrification. Protest against further property
development has focused on the preservation of a
unique local shopping culture in outdoor markets
such as Graham Street. Shopping here is itself a
form of cultural resistance (Figure 4).
Finally, Hong Kong shopping malls resist the
global economy by creating and fostering their own
local economies. Foreign domestic workers
encamped in the Central footbridges every Sunday
demonstrate the unequal social structure that
maintains the lifestyles afforded in the adjacent
malls, by establishing their own networks of service
exchange (Figure 5). In micromalls, multistoried
warrens of small independently owned shops
modeled on street markets, similarly resistant
networks of exchange, play out among teenagers,
hobbyists, and enthusiasts of all types, creating
centers of innovation for local fashion brands and
hybrid electronics.
Across Asia an atlas of ambiguity may be drawn
over the special economic zone, the gated housing
community, the corporate enclave, and the slum.
Neither public nor private in a classical sense, these
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ambiguous territories increasingly define the
character of the rapid and traumatic urbanization of
the continent. Hong Kong is one of the first post
industrial cities in Asia. Its unique conditions and
emerging civil society make it a special case worth
noting. While much of the fabric of this city tends
toward the enclave?podium-tower mega-block
housing and industrial estates?shopping malls go
to great lengths to remain highly networked spaces.
Like the train stations they inevitably connect to,
they are spaces of flow and exchange. The easiness
of capitalisms' fall in October of 2008 and of
China's rise to the position of global financial
superpower have cast Hong Kong's malls in a new
light as the spaces of civil society rather than of
global capital. Their infrastructure I conditions make
them de facto public spheres, despite the ambiguity
of rights or ownership. This contradictory condition,
a functioning mutual exclusivity, is not unfamiliar to
students of the postmodern city. Rather, it is the
emergence of the shopping mall as the grounds of
resistance in the Asian city that should come as a
surprise.
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Notes
1. Alison Jenner, "Bloc 28 by Disney." South Chino Morning Post,
Going Out/G03 (accessed July 16, 2009).
2. Joyce Kam, "Mall Teasers: Times Square." The Standard: Christmas
(accessed December 10, 2008).
3. Ng Kang-chung, "Call for People Power to Reclaim Public Space."
South China Morning Post, City (accessed March 25, 2008).
4. Information Services Department, Government of the Hong Kong
Special Administrative Region, "Government Releases Lists of Public
Facilities in Private Developments." Press Release (accessed March 28,
2008).
5. Timothy Chui, "Times Square in Test by Activists." The Standard:
Local, (accessed March 25, 2008).
6. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World
Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2002).
7. Rem Koolhaas, The Harvard Design School Guide to
Shopping/Harvard Design School Project on the City 2 (New York:
Taschen, 2002).
8. Robert Venturi, Steven Izenour, and Denise Scott Brown, Learning
from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977).
9. Kenneth Frampton, "Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance," in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 16-30.
10. Rem Koolhaas et al., "The Generic City," in S,M,L,XL, 2nd ed. (New
York: Monacelli, 1997), pp. 1248-46.
Learning from Louis Vuitton 70