Browsing by Subject "Architecture"
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Item Open Access A New Approach to Digitizing Cultural Heritage: Constructing Immersive VR Experiences of Traditional Huizhou Architecture(2023) Wei, ZiqiaoVernacular architectural studies are an integral part of the world’s cultural heritage research. Compared with other tangible or intangible cultural heritage, the physical properties of vernacular architecture and its site-specific nature make it difficult to be physically exhibited in museums, thus limiting the dissemination of vernacular culture and impeding the potential conservation awareness of its audiences. The development of new media technology in the 21st century, represented by virtual reality in particular, has helped to alleviate this cultural communication deadlock. This thesis focuses on the traditional architecture of Huizhou, and consists of a written paper and a digital project. The written paper explores the origins of Huizhou culture and discusses how long-term developments in ethnography, social history, and the natural environment have influenced the unique appearance and design concepts of Huizhou architecture. Moreover, based on the spatial affordances of digital media, the paper discusses how virtual reality (VR) technology can enhance the experience of, accessibility to, and interactivity with Huizhou architecture as represented through 3D reconstruction. The digital part of the thesis is a VR application called “Virtual Huizhou,” and was developed in Unreal Engine 5. This application is a 3D reconstruction of Yin Yu Tang. It will also demonstrate the role of VR in enhancing visitors’ interests and evoking cultural and emotional experiences through the following aspects: 3D models, interface design, and user experience functionalities.
Item Open Access A Virtual Museum of Architecture: Creating an Alternative Visitor Experience(2022) Qian, XinyueAlthough an integral part of art historical studies, authentic experiences of architecture have been excluded from the cathedrals of cultural objects, art museums. The built forms can seldomly fit into the doors of museums like art objects in a collection, due to their physical sizes and inseparable links with their surrounding environment. When architecture is presented under traditional museum setting, the visitor experience is often mediated and created by photos, videos, and scaled models. When architectures are converted into public spaces like tourists’ sites, onsite experiences in these spaces are typically biased for a particular duration of time and weather. Interaction with the space is limited due to preservation concerns. This project aims to provide an alternative architectural experience in response to these above limitations using digital methods, instead of trying to substitute the traditional museum experience or the authentic onsite experience. The digital component of this project curates a virtual space using the early access version of Unreal Engine 5, as an exploration of the state-of-the-art technologies in rendering virtual spaces. The project contains three example scenes: Church of the Light, Glass House, and Dom-Ino House. Instead of merely promoting a virtual or a physical experience of architecture, this study takes a critical stance towards the growing attention around digitization and discusses the possibilities of experiencing architecture in a virtual setting.
Item Open Access Applying GIS to the Logistics of Material Transportation for Constructing the Baths of Caracalla in Rome(2017) Manning, Stephanie MarionThe purpose of this thesis is to visualize the economic system (supply, production, and transportation) and the logistics of the movement of marble in the Roman Empire in an effort to better understand the larger system of material movement in Imperial Rome. This will be accomplished through a digital case study on the largest surviving bath complex in Rome, the Baths of Caracalla, for which we have evidence of the types of materials used in its construction and speculative observations on the quarries from which this material was procured. In order to effectively demonstrate this system and to accurately locate the Baths of Caracalla within the imperial trade network, a detailed visualization of the marble quarries and the web of transportation routes using ArcGIS Pro mapping software was created. Using ArcGIS Pro as a heuristic tool, this map will show the quarry sites and reconstruct the transportation routes by which marble was moved over long distances for the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. While the digital humanities have used the city of Rome as a site for experimental mapping projects on various subjects, this map on the stone quarries in the Roman Empire in relation to the Baths of Caracalla will be the first digital humanities mapping project of its type.
Item Open Access Architecture and the Performance of Citizenship in a Global City: Singapore, 1965-2015(2019) Bullock, Nathan FosterIn this dissertation, I present the ways in which architecture was used to perform citizenship in post-colonial Singapore from 1965-2015. During the first fifty years of independence, architects, alongside other artists and activists, contested the restrictions and exclusions of de facto and de iure citizenship through alternative proposals for the urban built environment. I make the case for an alternative architectural history based on those buildings which are excluded from the canon by virtue of their being unbuilt and rejected projects. Through archival research and interviews, I provide an historical narrative and visual analysis of these alternative proposals for architecture and politics. I argue for an understanding of both citizenship and architecture’s agency as performative. I begin with the Singapore Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Group’s proposals and continue with examples its co-leaders’—Tay Kheng Soon and William Lim—alternative unbuilt projects. The rejection of these architectural projects by the state reveals the rejection of the postcolonial social democratic politics on which they were based. This evidence demonstrates the continuity between British colonial control and one-party planning. I conclude that these architects were the forefront of envisioning and advocating for an alternative democratic ideal. Their contributions paved the way for visual and performing artists as well as civil society organizations to continue contesting the state’s oppressive politics.
Item Open Access Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity(2015) Boucher, Marie-PierIn the context of today's global mobility, information, bodies and goods are circulating across the globe, and even further into outer space. However, we face a paradox: the more we move, the more we become sedentary. The modes of transportation that enable our global mobility are working against us, insidiously dwindling our psycho-physical mobility. Globalization is thus not the world becoming bigger (or too big), but the world becoming immobile. Taking the body as the central non-place of political space, Architectures of Aliveness: Building Beyond Gravity interrogates the possibility of inhabiting circulation as a pragmatic form of resistance to the contemporary immobilization of life. In an era in which bodies and goods are ever more constantly in global circulation, architectures of aliveness ask, what would an experience of weightlessness do for us?
Biotechnology serves as the current dominant model for enlivening architecture and the mobility of its inhabitants. Architectures of aliveness invert the inquiry to look instead at outer space's modules of inhabitation. In questioning the possibility of making circulation inhabitable --as opposed to only inhabiting what is stationary--architectures of aliveness problematize architecture as a form of biomedia production in order to examine its capacity to impact psychic and bodily modalities toward an intensification of health. Problematized synchretically within life's mental and physical polarization, health is understood politically as an accretion of our capacity for action instead of essentially as an optimization of the biological body. The inquiry emerges at the intersection of biotechnology, neurosciences, outer space science and technology, and architecture. The analysis oscillates between historical and contemporary case studies toward an articulation that concentrates on contemporary phenomena while maintaining an historical perspective. The methodology combines archival research, interviews, and artistic and literary analysis. The analysis is informed by scientific research. More precisely, the objective is to construct an innovative mode of thinking about the fields of exchangeability between arts and sciences beyond a critique of instrumentality.
The outcomes suggest that architectures of aliveness are architectures that invite modes of inhabitation that deviate from habitualized everyday spatial engagements. It also finds that the feeling of aliveness emerges out of the production of analog or continuous space where the body is in relation with space as opposed to be represented in it. The analysis concludes that the impact of architecture on our sense of wellbeing is conditioned by proprioceptive experiences that are at once between vision and movement and yet at the same time in neither mode, suggesting an aesthetic of inhabitation based on our sense of weightedness and weightlessness.
These outcomes are thus transduced to the field of media studies to enchant biomediatic inquiry. Proposing a renewed definition of biomedia that interprets life as a form of aesthetic relation, architectures of aliveness also formulate a critique of the contemporary imperialism of visualization techniques. Architectures of aliveness conclude by questioning the political implications of its own method to suggest opacity and agonistic spaces as the biomediatic forms of political space.
Item Open Access Building the Good Life: Architecture and Politics(2010) Aslam, AliThis dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.
Item Open Access Designing Community: Architecture, Race and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-‐‑1950(2017) Seeskin, S. AbigailThe turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century saw unprecedented growth and change in the demographics of United States urban environs. Not only did U.S. cities grow bigger, they grew increasingly multicultural and multiracial. American architects, urban planners, and social reformers responded to this change by attempting to instill democratic values in American cities through zoning, gridding, and housing reform that sought to alternately include immigrant populations while excluding populations seen as not white (in particular, black communities). Designing Community: Architecture, Race, and Democracy in American Life Writing, 1900-1950 examines autobiographies produced in this era that use architectural metaphors in order to either enforce or challenge this democratizing project. Narrations of the self granted space for members of minoritized populations to show the limits of the architectural project to build democracy.
In a critical introduction and three subsequent chapters, I use methods of literary analysis to study life writing as well as novels, essays, newspaper articles, and poetry. Through my analysis of three life writing texts, I center autobiography as a genre critical to the production of community formation in the United States. Each chapter examines both a particular writer as well as a particular autobiographical technique. In my first chapter, I primarily examine the 1924 autobiography of Louis Sullivan titled The Autobiography of an Idea. I argue that Sullivan uses techniques lifted from the Bildungsroman in order to show his readers who they, too, can develop into democratic subjects. In my second chapter, I examine the 1950 memoir of the Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska titled Red Ribbon on a White Horse. I argue that her use of the confessional produces space for her to generate self-determination as a critical component to the production of multi-ethnic community. In my third chapter, I examine Richard Wright’s 1945 memoir Black Boy. I argue that his use of the testimonial enables readers to see human life as innately interconnected. In my conclusion I show that architectural metaphors continue to govern contemporary visions of democratic life in the United States, particularly as Donald Trump’s administration has campaigned to build a wall on the United States’s southern border. I argue that this is a moment in which those invested in racial justice should listen to minoritized voices.
Item Open Access Friars in the City: Mendicant Architecture and Pious Practice in Medieval Verona, c. 1220-c. 1375(2010) Labunski, Meagan GreenThis dissertation explores how the combination of pious practice, economic activity, and religious poverty shaped the architecture of the mendicants in medieval Verona. It also examines how the presence of the friars affected the city. By the thirteenth century, the populated centers of northern Italy were fertile grounds for heretical movements, religious skepticism, and anti-clerical attitudes. The mendicant orders developed as a response to the crisis of the medieval church in the city and provided a new concept of the religious vocation, one committed to voluntary poverty and the conversion of heretics. The most important representatives of the new orders were the Franciscans and Dominicans, who centered their religious mission in an urban context where the growth of commerce and a literate and numerate middle class required a new approach to pastoral care, one that directly addressed both doctrinal and social issues. The friars revolutionized traditional religious practice: they used exterior sites as extensions of liturgical space and their innovative approach to church architecture emphasized function and utility.
Existing studies on mendicant building have traditionally emphasized the formal characteristics of the monuments, examining churches in isolation, with little concern for context, use, and sequence of construction. This dissertation moves beyond this approach to consider the broader circumstances that frame the appearance of mendicant houses. It examines how the Franciscan church of S. Fermo Maggiore, the Dominican church of S. Anastasia, and their respective communities, responded to the dynamics of urban Verona. The study includes revised construction narratives and new dates for S. Fermo and S. Anastasia that emphasize the process of construction--how the friars approached their building projects--and the role of lay patronage in the configuration of architectural space. As research reveals, the friars began to erect their conventual complexes before instigating construction or reconstruction of the churches themselves, and this sequence had significant implications for how the friars used the spaces in and around their convent for preaching and liturgical celebrations. They planned or reconfigured their architectural space to both appeal to and accommodate the lay public and their pious practices, including sermon attendance, burial, and the veneration of local saints. Modifications to the exterior spaces around the convents likewise indicate their liturgical importance. By investigating the specific interactions between the mendicants and the city of Verona, this dissertation explores how the architecture of the friars expressed aspects of the society in which they operated.
Item Open Access Immersive Projection: A Case Study on the Duke Chapel Interior(2018) Hung, Ju-YuIn my thesis, I explore the potential of projection mapping for storytelling by using Duke Chapel interior as an example. Through the investigation of what filmmaker Frederick Backer calls “Projectionism,” I focus on the “projectile” (image) and “receiver” (surface) of contemporary projection mapping and analyze two case studies. Additionally, I consider the relationship between memory and architecture. Drawing on the Duke University Archives, I selected Duke's West Campus style as the basis for the construction of a storyline for my digital project.
Duke Chapel’s crossing serves as the project’s main canvas and to the thesis outlines the process of constructing a scale model of the Chapel’s crossing through photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and 3D printing technologies. Finally, I discuss the various strategies I used to tell the story of the choice of Collegiate Gothic for the architectural style of Duke’s West Campus and argue for projection-mapping as a powerful method of showing and telling.
Item Open Access Modeling Ambiguity: An Analysis of the Paris Temple(2019) Carrillo, Alan RicardoThe Paris Temple is a monument that has been lost since the start of the 19th century. This thesis aims to digitally reconstruct this monument in a new virtual environment in order to explore the value of digital modeling and mapping. Asking: can we consider these tools effective or not when attempting to reconcile incommensurable historical evidence on spaces that have been either destroyed or transformed? The thesis first reviews the current state of scholarship, in conjunction with the use of digital techniques, surrounding both the Order of the Knights Templar and medieval architecture as a whole.
Through a synthesis of both analog and digital methods a new perspective can be reached. Mapping in this project is only used to contextualize the Paris Temple in the entirety of the Templar Network that spread across Europe. ESRI’s ArcGIS was the mapping tool used to make this map, and a combination of Vectorworks and Autodesk Fusion 360 were used to make the Paris Temple’s model. With these digital techniques the scale of the historical evidence is able to be manipulated in three different ways: in its capacity, temporal qualities, and proximity to the object. Through this manipulation and essential modeling a more holistic understanding of the site was reached.
Item Open Access Modernity, Sanitation and the Public Bath: Berlin, 1896-1933, as Archetype(2007-12-14) Dillon, Jennifer ReedThis dissertation documents and analyzes the architecture of the working-class bathhouse - its emergence in the nineteenth-century and revision and continued elaboration in the twentieth. It is a case study that examines how social ideas about modernity, health, and the body were translated into the built environment at a formative moment in Western urbanization. The first two chapters take a transnational perspective, with a survey of several urban centers (London, New York, Montreal). Chapter Three and Four focus in on Berlin as the central case study. The hygiene movement was deeply concerned with the built environment from its inception. Concepts of circulation and order were imbued with powerful health values, producing designs for the bathhouse that emphasized separation, regulation and a radically simplified space. Changing concepts of public life and the civic body shaped architectures of hygiene and inflected their decorative programs. A historical, spatial narrative of architecture and the body politic is opened up by a history of the bathhouse, which crosses Old World-New World, Historicist-Modernist, and Wilhelmine-Weimar boundaries. The substance of this research is drawn from previously unexamined archival and archaeological evidence from city bathhouses constructed in Berlin during the Wilhelmine period (Turmstrasse, Schillingsbrücke, Baerwaldstrasse, Dennowitzstrasse, Oderbergerstrasse and Gerichtstrasse Volksbadeanstalten), as well as the Weimar period (Mitte and Lichtenberg). The discussion of Weimar bathhouses includes a reading of Strandbad Wannsee (Martin Wagner, Richard Ermisch), Stoedieck and Poelzig's plans for the Thermenpalast (1929), and the graphic record of Heinrich Zille's Rund um's Freibad (1926). Critical perspectives rooted in the spatial politics of Lefebvre, Bourdieu, Benjamin, and Althusser help evaluate bathhouse architecture as a representational medium, a productive gadget, and a medical technology. The resulting history argues not only that social hygiene played different kinds of roles in the development of modern architecture, but also that changing concepts of the hygienic body generated diverse modes of interaction between the individual and the public sphere.Item Open Access Philibert de L’Orme’s Divine Proportions and the Composition of the Premier tome de l’architecture(2018-12) Galletti, SaraItem Open Access Political Postmodernisms: Architecture in Chile and Poland, 1970-1990(2018) Klein, Lidia“Political Postmodernisms” argues that postmodern architecture can be radically rethought by examining its manifestations in Chile and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodern architecture tends to be understood as politically indifferent and devoid of the progressive agenda embedded in modernist architecture – a view typically rooted in the analyses of North America and Western Europe. By investigating the cases of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, my project unfolds a less acknowledged narrative—one in which postmodernism is profoundly entangled with the political. Drawing from interviews I conducted with a range of Chilean and Polish architects, as well as analyses of physical buildings, urban development plans, and architectural journals from Santiago and Warsaw, I show how these South American and Eastern European sites reveal an altogether different dynamic between capitalism, democracy, and architecture.
The dissertation is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction discusses the current revivalism of postmodernism and its critique, tracing the roots of this criticism in foundational scholarship on postmodern architecture, and analyzing how postmodernism is defined in architectural scholarship. It also discusses why Chile and Poland are chosen as case studies. The first chapter, “Postmodernism and the State: Chile,” discusses propagandistic uses of postmodern architecture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile, using two case studies – the Plaza de la Constitución in Santiago de Chile (1980) and the Congreso de Chile in Valparaíso (1987). The second chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Chile,” examines the practices of architects who were members of CEDLA, an independent collective of Chilean architects established in 1977 in Santiago, who promoted a version of politically and socially engaged postmodernism that could counter Pinochet’s neoliberal agenda. Chapter Three, “Postmodernism and the State: Poland,” analyzes how the Polish Socialist Party first appropriated postmodernism as a Soviet invention and then used it as a means to appease social tensions in times of increasing unrest. It focuses specifically on state-sanctioned architectural discourse and the Na Skarpie housing estate in Kraków (1985). The final chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Poland,” discusses Polish architects organized under the Dom i Miasto group (1980–1984), which united postmodern inspirations with agendas that opposed the vision of society imposed by the Polish People’s Republic. It also discusses the work of Marek Budzyński, for whom postmodernism created a “third way” beyond socialism and capitalism.
Across these chapters, I argue that Chilean and Polish architecture between 1970 and 1990 complicate the generally accepted view of postmodern architecture as politically disengaged and as an exclusively neoliberal phenomenon, disinterested in any progressive social agenda. In both countries, postmodern currents were appropriated by the regimes for propagandistic purposes and used to oppose the agendas of the State.
Item Open Access Technology Impacts of CMOS Scaling on Microprocessor Core Design for Hard-Fault Tolerance in Single-Core Applications and Optimized Throughput in Throughput-Oriented Chip Multiprocessors(2010) Bower, FredThe continued march of technological progress, epitomized by Moore’s Law provides the microarchitect with increasing numbers of transistors to employ as we continue to shrink feature geometries. Physical limitations impose new constraints upon designers in the areas of overall power and localized power density. Techniques to scale threshold and supply voltages to lower values in order to reduce power consumption of the part have also run into physical limitations, exacerbating power and cooling problems in deep sub-micron CMOS process generations. Smaller device geometries are also subject to increased sensitivity to common failure modes as well as manufacturing process variability.
In the face of these added challenges, we observe a shift in the focus of the industry, away from building ever–larger single–core chips, whose focus is on reducing single–threaded latency toward a design approach that employs multiple cores on a single chip to improve throughput. While the early multicore era utilized the existing single–core designs of the previous generation in small numbers, subsequent generations have introduced cores tailored to multicore use. These cores seek to achieve power-efficient throughput and have led to a new emphasis on throughput-oriented computing, particularly for Internet workloads, where the end-to-end computational task is dominated by long–latency network operations. The ubiquity of these workloads makes a compelling argument for throughput–oriented designs, but does not free the microarchitect fully from latency demands of common workloads in enterprise and desktop application spaces.
We believe that a continued need for both throughput–oriented and latency–sensitive processors will exist in coming generations of technology. We further opine that making effective use of the additional transistors that will be available may require different techniques for latency–sensitive designs than for throughput–oriented ones, since we may trade latency or throughput for the desired attribute of a core in each of the respective paradigms.
We make three major contributions with this thesis. Our first contribution is a fine–grained fault diagnosis and deconfiguration technique for array structures, such as the ROB, within the microprocessor core. We present and evaluate two variants of this technique. The first variant uses an existing fault detection and correction technique whose scope is the processor core execution pipeline to ensure correct processor operation. The second variant integrates fault detection and correction into the array structure itself to provide a self–contained, fine–grained, fault detection, diagnosis, and repair technique.
In our second contribution, we develop a lightweight, fine–grained fault diagnosis mechanism for the processor core. In this work, we leverage the first contribution's methods to provide deconfiguration of faulty array elements. We additionally extend the scope of that work to include all pipeline circuitry from instruction issue to retirement.
In our third and final contribution, we focus on throughput–oriented core data cache design. In this work, we study the demands of the throughput–oriented core running a representative workload and then propose and evaluate an alternative data cache implementation that more closely matches the demands of the core. We then show that a better–matched cache design can be exploited to provide improved throughput under a fixed power budget.
Our results show that typical latency–sensitive cores have sufficient redundancy to make finegrained hard–fault tolerance an affordable alternative for hardening complex designs. Our designs suffer little or no performance loss when no faults are present and retain nearly the same performance characteristics in the presence of small numbers of hard faults in protected structures. In our study of the latency–sensitive core, we have shown that SRAM–based designs have low latencies that end up providing less benefit to a throughput–oriented core and workload than a better–fitted data cache composed of DRAM. The move from a high–power, fast technology to a lower–power, slower technology allows us to increase L1 data cache capacity, which is a net benefit for the throughput–oriented core.
Item Open Access The Architectural History of Beverley Minster, 721-c. 1370(2011) Woodworth, Matthew HaysThis dissertation is the first architectural history devoted to Beverley Minster, a large and ambitious Gothic church located in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Beverley is one of the most important medieval buildings in England, but it has been almost entirely ignored in the literature. The church is composed of three parts: choir and transepts (c. 1225-1260), nave (c. 1308-c. 1370), and west façade (c. 1380-1420).
The thesis begins with a description of the destroyed buildings that occupied the site during the Saxon and Romanesque periods. The remainder of the dissertation focuses on the work completed at the Minster during the fourteenth century, in the so-called Decorated style. First, the nave is analyzed and its construction is assigned to six campaigns between the years c. 1308-c. 1370. Much discussion is devoted to the "historicism" of the nave's conservative design, which is a subtly modernized version of the east end that preceded it. Contemporary documents also permit discussion of the financial contributions of the laity, canons, and municipal leaders who paid for the nave to be built.
Finally, a detailed analysis is offered for the furnishings made at Beverley between 1292 and c. 1340: the reredos (high altar screen), sedilia (seating for priests), and the destroyed shrine which once contained the relics of St. John of Beverley. Like the nave, they are all neglected masterpieces of the Decorated style.
Item Open Access The Cartography of Hong Kong Urban Space: Living and Walking in the Cinematic Cityscapes of Fruit Chan and Ann Hui(2021) Zhang, HuiqiHong Kong has long been ensnared in the problems of limited housing and soaring land prices, which renders its physical space one of the most visible criteria embodying its social inequalities. Regarding space as an overarching concern andframework, this thesis mainly focuses on the representations and portrayals of Hong Kong’s urban space in Fruit Chan and Ann Hui’s films and further examines how the directors engage with social spaces in reality through depicting various cinematic spaces. All of these films explore the grassroots space of the underprivileged and marginalized people, which constitutes the underside of Hong Kong’s glamorous urban space shaped by economic developments and globalization. Fruit Chan’s Handover Trilogy including Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), Little Cheung (1999), as well as the first two installments of his Prostitute Trilogy, Durian Durian (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong (2000) hence reflect on how economic, political and social conditions are factored into the uncanny mutations and distortions of varying spaces ranging from public housing estates, cemeteries, streets to squatter villages. Ann Hui’s companion films, The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), offer a detailed characterization of public housing estates and discuss the notion of housing in metropolitan contexts. The two directors deploy and recreate these paradigmatic spaces of Hong Kong as a critique of the history and social hierarchy of Hong Kong, which are intimately involved with the complexity of postcoloniality, neoliberalism, and globalization. Based on theories of spatiality, psychoanalysis, and urban sociology, this thesis argues that these cinematic spaces can be viewed as a site to negotiate with urban planning, spatial practices, transregional and transnational movements. On the one hand, space registers the hierarchical division of the society that renders the underprivileged more vulnerable. On the other hand, connections and a sense of community can also emerge from the space appropriated by its inhabitants. Furthermore, by engaging with border-crossing subjects, these films explore social spaces beyond Hong Kong and provide possibilities of investigating the broader social reality of post-socialist China, destabilizing the static binaries between local and global, periphery and center.
Item Open Access The Street Must Be Defended: Towards a Theory of Assembly on Hong Kong’s Avenida de la Revolución(2020) Tran, Andrew ChiFrom North Africa and the Middle East to Europe, the Americas, and East Asia, the social movements of the past decade have, without being in explicit dialogue with one another, resembled the same march into the public street. Despite the breadth of the cultural, political, and topographical variations in the spaces and places that these movements cover, even in a city like Hong Kong, where the development of urban space has taken a trajectory and assumed a quality of unique status, protest seems to march to the beat of the same drum in Hong Kong’s tropical, urban financial center as it does in St. Louis’ suburban neighborhoods. Why, despite the obvious differences from city-to- city and street-to-street, does protest seem to look the same across societies, cultures, and regimes?
This paper explores the theoretical matrix by which discourses of the street have emerged alongside the imperialisms of the nineteenth century to take inventory of the ways in which the street speaks and is spoken about in the city, in politics, in poetry and literature. While these discourses illuminate the coordinates and mediations in the implicit conception of the street, they only complement the very real emergence and mutations of urban space in Hong Kong in the twentieth century driven by finance capital. I chart the contours of the history of the street in Hong Kong and the ways of capturing the assemblies that have always taken place on it in a step towards understanding how social movement and political assembly can be made effective in contemporary urban space.