Dominique Cheng
figure 1 Grand Aviary Schematic Plan
Circuit diagram illustrating the ‘processor’ Chek Lap Kok (current Hong Kong International Airport) hard-wired to the ‘receptor’ Kai Tak (former Hong Kong International Airport). Activity in the form of take-offs and landings occurring at the new airport are fed simultaneously to the old airport to activate a series of staged disturbances in South Kowloon.
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accessible by ferry) to the new airport, the journey heightening the excitement of air travel. Some questions come to mind: in the collective
A O’C: Landscape as palimpsest – this ties back to landscape in a geological sense, layers and stratification of history in landscape, and then built upon with additional layers above the surface, each telling a story. For me, the conclusion of this act of remembering is not necessarily a physical effect, such as on the underground) circulation as well as the patterns of urban growth generated by their location? Commemoration could then provide a hitherto absent lens for us to read the city’s transformation.
process of building, though it could be, but rather a new way of seeing and reading space and landscape. This idea of landscape as palimpsest also connects to critical writing in landscape discourse – Sébastien Marot, in the last chapter of Sub- Urbanism and the Art of Memory, describes Georges Descombes’ Parc de Lancy and traces the history of the site revealed in the park design. This leads into the idea of memory in landscape, and brings to mind Robert Smithson’s Monuments of Passaic New Jersey and Marc Treib’s edited
volume ‘Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape’. Also Rachel Whiteread: www. publicartfund.org/view/ exhibitions/5899_water_ tower And then there is the topic of airports themselves (active and deactive) which has emerged in landscape discourse and is itself a fruitful topic for discussion. Aerial landscapes are rendered tangible in Luis Callejas’ proposal to stop expansion at Heathrow Airport and on the ground proposals for airports. In 2013 Harvard GSD held an exhibition and
memory of the city, do we mourn the loss of an airport -- a
building typology that is fundamentally functional? What is the role of an airport (often our first impression of a city, and sometimes a very vivid one) in the identity of a city, and what will be gained by commemorating it? Or is this less about commemorating the airport itself, but remembering the transient paths of air (and surface, and
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