Monnik was invited to present the Babel project —the development of a logographic script for Europe— at the Urbanism/Architect Bi-City Biennale in Shenzhen (UABB).
Day 1 / Monday / AMS ✈
We’re waiting at the Schiphol airport to embark on our trip to Hong Kong. As preparation we’ve gather a couple of books from friends and our bookshelves to do some airplane chair research. The first one worth mentioning is Cecilia Lindqvist’s China: Empire of Symbols that beautifully illustrates the origins, etymology and cultural history behind the Chinese characters. The refined graphics of the book remind me me of Edward Tufte‘s books on the art of visualization. The other book is Scott McCloud‘s brilliant Understanding Comics. It is a comic on comics that connects language, images and semiotics into the single field of ‘sequential art.’ Ranging from hieroglyphs to comics, and from cinema to language. Below is one of the famous spreads out of the book, that introduces the concept of The Big Triangle between pictures, reality and meaning that confines the ways we can understand and read the world by what he calls a ‘retinal edge’ a ‘representational edge’ and a ‘conceptual edge’. Here McCloud explains it properly, and better than I can.
Day 2 / Tuesday / HKG
After a three hour delay we arrive in Hong Kong — we quickly check in at the Lyton Inn at Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon and make our way to the metro to meet Mart van de Ven – a friend of a friend. He takes us to nice little bar called Club 71 on a nice quite side street. Mart is a linguist and data analysts and recently started Open Data Hong Kong. We talk about how emoji and stickers are the most recent addition to what we use for writing. One idea that passed in conversation is to do data analysis on a anonymized dataset of Line or WhatsApp, to see how new language conventions are emerging on these new writing platforms and to answer questions like: How are emoji’s used? What role do they play in writing? What do they add? In which ways do they augment the existing language spectrum?
Side Note: Today we’re writing more than ever in history, and we’re also writing more informally than ever before, and thus much the kind of writing we do today is a very different kind of writing. It expresses other things in other ways. Writing (in the case of texting and chatting) was never so ephemeral as it is today.
We say goodbye to Mart and make our way back to the metro over Hong Kong’s endless elevated walkways.
Day 3 / Wednesday / Urban Exploration Hong Kong
After a shallow night of sleep, punctuated by the lyrical mood of Karaoke bar downstairs we get up and greet our first Kowloon cockroach. We head out for breakfast and some urban exploring.
Kowloon Park
After a noodle soup for breakfast we walk around searching for a map or guide and some coffee, which proves to be not so easy. Our wanderings takes us to the exotic birds in Kowloon park, along block-long lines of mainland Chinese standing queueing in front of designer brand stores waiting patiently to get there hands on some Luis Vuitton or Prada handbags.
Hong Kong skyline (from Kowloon)
After a stroll along the waterfront we take the ferry and a coffee to Hong Kong Island where our search for a bookshop continues.
Jungle Island
We give up our bookshop search after probing some shopping malls and decide to climb Victoria Peak to get an overview of the city. We discover the Peak Tram, and quickly find that we’ve bought into a tourist trap. Which proves to be more than just a metaphor. The Peak Tram’s terminal station is a shopping mall that doesn’t’ seem to have an exit! When we finally find the exit out of the shopping labyrinth we are presented with an impressive urban panorama.
View from Victoria Peak
The haziness that prevents us to properly see Kowloon turns out not to be fog, but the air pollution blowing over from the Pearl River Delta cities.
Concrete Jungle
We make our way down the Peak on foot through a concrete forest, before we arrive in a tranquil and green vertical suburbia of enormous apartment towers.
Green and tranquil Hong Kong residential area
Vertical Suburbia
We wander around the market downtown while the dusk sets. We find a cheap noodle joint and eat.
Hong Kong market
Cyberpunk Hong Kong Urbanism
Notice the truck passing by…
Jardine House
After dinner we head to our meet-up with Teun van den Ende, who curated and will moderate our event at the UABB. But before we head up to the roof of the IFC Mall to meet him, Christiaan is captured by the skyscraper next to the IFC. A 48 story tall bunker with round windows that is the illustrious Jardine House, one of the most powerful trading houses, or Hongs, of Hong Kong that provided the backdrop for the intrigues of Noble House by James Clavell.
Day 3 / Thursday / Urban Fog and The Printing Press
Today we leave for Shenzhen, but first we meet with Jean Du, who will be taking part in the discussion of the Babel project at UABB. She reminds us that Victor Hugo said that ‘the printing press will kill architecture.’ The quote comes from Hugo’s novel Notre Dame de Paris.
Early in Victor Hugo’s novel of medieval Paris, Notre Dame de Paris, the antagonist, Claude Frollo, utters a terrifying line. He directs the eyes of two visitors from a book on his desk to the massive silhouette of Notre Dame cathedral beyond his door, Frollo then announces: “This will kill that.”
“That” is the cathedral, “this” is the machine that produced the book on his desk: the printing press. “Small things overcome great ones,” Frollo laments, “the book will kill the building.”
For Frollo — or, rather, Hugo — the history of architecture is the history of writing. Before the printing press, mankind communicated through architecture. From Stonehenge to the Parthenon, alphabets were inscribed in “books of stone.” Rows of stones were sentences, Hugo insists, while Greek columns were “hieroglyphs” pregnant with meaning.
… continue reading here (from the radio show: Engines of our Ingenuity / #2293)
We head for the Macau ferry terminal to catch the boat to Shekou (Shenzhen).
Macau Ferry Terminal
As ferry leaves it disappears into the ‘fog.’ Although we can barely see the shoreline from our window, we can still vaguely make out the massive chimney’s of the power plants that support booming Shenzhen. Arguably Shenzhen houses more than 15 million people, making it the most crowded city of China. If we zoom out a little further we can see how the ferry network is actually at the heart of the biggest urban cluster in the world. The Pearl River Delta Megacity that houses around 100 million souls.
Upon arrival in Shekou, Shenzhen we encounter a monumentalized credo for the growth economy: Time is money, efficiency is life. An optimistic believe in the economic rationality that drives China’s progress that shows no sign of irony. In amazement we take it in, unsure what to think of it.
Time is money, efficiency is life
After checking into the lovely Crystal Garden hotel we take the bus to the Value Factory, to explore the venue where we’ll be presenting.
Value Factory
After a tour of the festival grounds with curator Jorn Konijn we follow a route architectural through the factory silo’s ending at a view over the adjacent container terminal.
Shenzhen Container Terminal
Day 4 / Friday / Work
No sightseeing or noteworthy anecdotes. We spend the full day in the Crystal Garden lobby to finish our presentation for the next day.
Day 5 / Saturday / Ancient Carpentry and Urban Safari
Today is the day, it is ‘Holland Day,’ the framework in which we were invited to come and present Babel. We have a slot of two hours, in which we present Babel, have alternating translation to Chinese, and a discussion moderated by Teun van den Ende with Jean Du (Hong Kong University), Cédric van Parys (AMO) and Ole Bouman, the head curator of the UABB/Value Factory
After a successful presentation and lively discussion we finally have time to properly explore the other projects in the Value Factory. Cédric van Parys ,who runs the OMA workshop, explains how they’re trying to understand and translate the Yingzao Fashi —an ancient Chinese architecture treatise— into 1:3 blue styrofoam models and a first English version of the manual.
On the factory’s ground floor Juan Du shows us the work that her student made for the Safari SZHK project: a self-guided tour of urban wildlife along two connecting rail lines that bring you from Hong Kong to Shenzhen. The project shows how the man-made environments of the city and nature’s ecosystems collide, and how in surprising ways urban habitats emerge for hawks, tilapia and dragonflies. Sometimes conflicting, other times symbiotic.
Day 6 / Sunday / Urban Exploration Shenzhen
On our last full day we join Archis on their Urban Border RSVP through Shenzhen. After picking up Thomas Daniell at the ferry terminal we take the metro to Baishizhou, where we meet Xiaodi Yang of PAO who takes us on a tour through one of the more than a thousand urban villages in Shenzhen. Urban villages are a phenomenon particular to Chinese urbanization. These area’s are zones inside the metropolis where the city authorities have little to say about land use, since the land use rights belong to a collective of villagers. This situation emerged because in farming villages people had land use rights, and thus autonomy over what they could do with the land. With the rapid expansion of the city the villages were encapsulated by the sprawling metropolis physically but were not integrate in terms of jurisdiction, thus maintaining their autonomy within the city..
If you want to know more about this urban phenomenon check out the research Yushi Uehara did with The Berlage here [PDF], published in Volume #2 and in AD’s issue on New Urban China (in full here).
Village in a City
The urban village, with the enormous apartment tower of the city behind it.
Entrance gate to the urban village
Day 7 / Monday / HKG ✈ AMS
Today we travel back to Amsterdam. Upon arrival in Amsterdam we receive an image from Teun, who travelled back on another flight and in transit at Frankfurt airport. It shows a billboard that revealing the latent possibility for a common European language platform, and that ever evolving communication technology is its harbinger.
Do you speak European?
