By the 1990s, the airport had reached a tipping point, warranting plans for a new replacement airport. Kai Tak Airport was officially retired in July 1998 in favour of Chek Lap Kok Airport located on reclaimed land 19 miles to the west. The Kai Tak site remained predominantly vacant for over a decade due to extreme levels of petroleum contamination and escalating property costs. Today, it is a ferry cruise terminal with tall residential development filling what was once restricted airspace; the airfield apron and the checkerboard markers are the only remaining relics of the past. The landing approach itself is immortalised in amateur home videos, photographs and recollections gathered from retired pilots and planespotters alike.
3 The project is a series of urban interventions (or staged disturbances) mapping the trajectory of the former flight path. They make reference to the landing approach via the city as a communicative interface. A direct relationship is created between the new airport (Chek Lap Kok International Airport) and the old airport, as one is programmed to respond to the other through various transformations in architecture and landscape in South Kowloon ( figure 1 ). Highrises are retrofitted with ‘spotters’, or mechanical oculi that move in unison to scan the city for aircraft during take-off and landing ( figure 3 ). Street signs momentarily rotate like flapper boards to display the flight codes (airline and flight number) of both outgoing and incoming flights. At the runway, the process of remediation is exhibited as a symphony of air and sound as at regular intervals pipes buried in the soil extract and exhaust contaminants in the form of gas ( figure 2 ). The interventions, deployed in sequential order and triggered by data originating from the new airport, simulate the experience of a phantom airport.
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Dominique Cheng
figure 2 Sparging Field
In a state of disuse, the landing strip is populated with siphons that release contaminated air back out into the atmosphere through a process of soil vapour extraction and air sparging. The process of remediation is transformed into a performance of sound.
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