BETWEEN ORDER AND CONTINGENCY - THE BECOMING OF HONG KONG �S INDIGENOUS ARCHITECTURE

Abstract

This paper examines the interplay between order and contingency in architecture through an investigation of Hong Kong’s indigenous architecture. Order and contingency are commonly understood as a mutually exclusive pair – modernity’s persistent endeavour to uphold the former by exterminating the later demonstrates this dichotomised view. This paper aims to construct an alternative perspective of the two, as opposed to such dichotomy. It looks at the ordering structure of Hong Kong and studies how its indigenous architecture in the form of subdivided apartments, rooftop structures and illegal facades may be a by-product of this ordering. It will be argued that such architecture consists of a new synthesis stemming from a contingent multiplicity for which order is a premise, rather than an agent of reduction and discrimination. As dwellers challenge modernity’s will to order by performing onto buildings acts of appropriation with resolve, resistance and even ruthlessness, indeterminate and parasitic spaces are created. These actions of appropriation appear to be violent and savage-like, but only so because of our expectations of conformity in a modern, orderly and predictable world. If instead, such contingent acts were to be understood as a force that interacts with order to spawn new spatial possibilities, what does it mean for architects who traditionally served as the creators of order? Contingency constitutes architecture’s elusive “other” – the workings of which we may never fully comprehend. It is only through approximation by the construction of rules that we may attempt to understand it. This dissertation proposes that in breaking the established order, the contingent is not necessarily totally anarchic. Rather, another set of sensibilities surface to form a spontaneous order. Upon scrutiny, there may be little distinction in principle between this spontaneous order and a constructed order, leaving us to question the perceived superiority and legitimacy of one order over the other, or the very notion of a stable and finite order. This paper will present this ambivalence as an opening of possibilities, and the indigenous architecture of Hong Kong as an actualisation of such possibilities.