THERMALLMETER: MODELING THE ENVIRONMENTS OF HONG KONG SHOPPING MALLS
2010
Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong
With Joanne Ooi and The Clean Air Network
Research supported by AirTek Hong Kong
Assistants: Gweny Jin, Margie Tam
Exhibited in
Quotidian Architecture
Hong Kong in Venice
People Meet in Architecture
La Biennale di Venezia
28 August - 11 November 2010
Thermallmeter explores the role of shopping malls as public space and infrastructure in Hong Kong. The exhibition, conceived of as a series of spatial models, promotes one of the most exciting and simultaneously most overlooked of Hong Kong’s unique architectural and urban achievements: the shopping mall.
While the skyscraper is the most visible manifestation of architecture in Hong Kong, the shopping mall is more complex, uniquely evolved, and relevant to the movement and interaction of people. As a result of its development and proliferation, the shopping mall is inextricable from the public dimension of the city—it is the space where people meet in Hong Kong.
Thermallmeter materializes specific qualities of the city’s integrated transport and shopping networks, where people move and meet in daily life. Infrastructural networks — above and below ground, vehicular and pedestrian — create continuous environments that reify everyday life in Hong Kong. By displaying these environments as tangible forms, the exhibit presents is an architectural manifestation of both the fascinating and the quotidian. Comprising tunnels, bridges, open decks, partially covered footbridges, and a variety of building interiors, this continuous network is in fact host to a variety of different environments. Thermallmeter codes indications of the changing gradient of environmental indicators in diagrams. The relation between shopping mall spaces and air temperatures suggests architectural implications in circulation — where pedestrian access is encouraged, where people stop and linger, where smokers gather, where the bus terminal is sandwiched between air conditioned floors.
Hong Kong shopping malls are essential to daily life in the city. While shopping is coined Hong Kong’s favorite sport, many other leisure activities happen inside and outside these semi-public spaces, turning them into studies in architectural and urban program integrated in everyday social patterns.
2010
Adam Frampton, Jonathan D Solomon and Clara Wong
With Joanne Ooi and The Clean Air Network
Research supported by AirTek Hong Kong
Assistants: Gweny Jin, Margie Tam
Exhibited in
Quotidian Architecture
Hong Kong in Venice
People Meet in Architecture
La Biennale di Venezia
28 August - 11 November 2010
Thermallmeter explores the role of shopping malls as public space and infrastructure in Hong Kong. The exhibition, conceived of as a series of spatial models, promotes one of the most exciting and simultaneously most overlooked of Hong Kong’s unique architectural and urban achievements: the shopping mall.
While the skyscraper is the most visible manifestation of architecture in Hong Kong, the shopping mall is more complex, uniquely evolved, and relevant to the movement and interaction of people. As a result of its development and proliferation, the shopping mall is inextricable from the public dimension of the city—it is the space where people meet in Hong Kong.
Thermallmeter materializes specific qualities of the city’s integrated transport and shopping networks, where people move and meet in daily life. Infrastructural networks — above and below ground, vehicular and pedestrian — create continuous environments that reify everyday life in Hong Kong. By displaying these environments as tangible forms, the exhibit presents is an architectural manifestation of both the fascinating and the quotidian. Comprising tunnels, bridges, open decks, partially covered footbridges, and a variety of building interiors, this continuous network is in fact host to a variety of different environments. Thermallmeter codes indications of the changing gradient of environmental indicators in diagrams. The relation between shopping mall spaces and air temperatures suggests architectural implications in circulation — where pedestrian access is encouraged, where people stop and linger, where smokers gather, where the bus terminal is sandwiched between air conditioned floors.
Hong Kong shopping malls are essential to daily life in the city. While shopping is coined Hong Kong’s favorite sport, many other leisure activities happen inside and outside these semi-public spaces, turning them into studies in architectural and urban program integrated in everyday social patterns.
IFC Mall and Central Footbridge Network
Central Footbridge Network Public Passage