JOURNEY ALONG THE CENTRAL MIDLEVEL ESCALATOR LINK : A FILMIC EXPERIENCE OF HONG KONG URBANSCAPE

Abstract

The study of the Hong Kong Central Midlevel Escalator Link, its surrounding context and flanerie along its course, identifies it with potentials and opportunities exceeding its role as transportation infrastructure. Through flanerie along its course: 1. Users cognitively understand the city’s urban context, feel its urban culture, and experience its urban landscape. 2. Users experience the city physically and visually, through motion on it, at varied speed, time and tempo; it consists of ascending and descending escalators and travelators, walkways, turns and stops. This thesis aims to design a Film and Photography Centre along the Escalator Link as Film and Photography imbue similar flanerie notion of seeing versus being seen, and experience (capture through camera motion.) The Escalator Link acts as catalyst for urban interventions on its immediate urban fabric (i.e. parasite empty building surfaces and the Escalator Link, reprogram existing building units, insert or replace old or vacant buildings blocks, infill vacant lands.) Proposed interventions in form of progressive insertions of the Centre’s functions along its course, under the themes: explore, understand, study, learn, practice and appreciate film and photography. The interventions portrayed like frames of film or photographs narrate a Hong Kong story. The project purpose to create, re-create and reshape the urban landscape into a Hong Kong cityscape of local culture, distinct by the ephemeral nature, high density pigeonholed life, diverse and mixed use, informal and ad-hoc construction (i.e. illegal balconies, advertisement signboards) and temporal construction language. (I.e. hawkers, street markets, carnivals)