The Hermitage is a massive residential property under construction in Kowloon (Hong Kong). I was living just next to its location, so I could see the progress of its development and I was very intrigued by the inside. Few weeks ago, I was walking in the adjacent Olympian shopping mall and I discovered that The Hermitage opened its showroom to the public. It went beyond all my expectations and was by far the craziest thing I have seen during my stay in Hong Kong, The showroom is completely out of reality, immersing visitors into a manufactured ‘dream’-like experience.

People from Hong Kong and Asia more generally associate romantic western imagery with luxury. The Hermitage gives them all that on steroids. The showroom is entirely in marble, fake gold, crystals and mirrors. Space is very expensive in Hong Kong and most of the apartments on sale are actually very small, but no trick is spared to make the flats look bigger: lights, mirrors, smaller than usual furniture. The Hermitage showroom plays a soundtrack which is a condensed version of cheesy opera music, at the moment when the princess falls in love with the prince. They also made a dream like movie introducing the property; again everything is in gold.

Associations with symbols of prestige are heavily used to promote the apartments. Real Rolls-Royces from Europe are on display in the showroom and in the huge ads flooding the Hong Kong subway. But the most surprising is the collection of authentic Russian golden accessories displayed in introduction to one of the showroom. Models of high end apartments made of crystal-like material are then presented in the same fashion than the golden artefacts, in case someone didn’t appreciate well enough there intrinsic value. Videos mix images of the property and the original Hermitage in St Petersburg, making it somehow confusing, but the point is of course not to make it all rational, we are in a dream. The property is not so central in Hong Kong but the issue has been cleverly resolved by introducing the concept of ‘golden circle’ which happens to enclose the Hermitage property and the most famous central landmarks, a wonderful marketing imagery.

Tens of clerks and estate agents stand in the many showrooms, all very polite and nice. One was explaining to a potential buyer that the Hermitage is also the biggest museum in Paris, not so right, but who cares anyway.

The showroom itself is not even in The Hermitage building, it is just a temporary site reproducing with some liberty the final product, and you can even visit reproductions of the lifts! When you visit the fake flats all decorated in a very heavy romantic style, red sections are displayed on the floor to indicate space that will actually not be part of the asset on sale, so potential buyers still get the correct information, but from a manufactured dream that can completely submerge them. It is a fake of a fake to use postmodernist terminology. I would recommend anyone to visit the showroom, you will have a great time and it is even better than Hong Kong Disneyland or casinos from Macau!

Ok, this entertainment complex is clearly fake and tasteless.

Here are some nice Portuguese ceramic tiles on a concrete building.

The Lisboa casino dates from the 60s. Its retro architecture is refreshing and its name is directly related to the history of Macau.

Its recent extension, the Grand Lisboa looks more like a building coming from space, and the inside is not so interesting.

Here is a view of Macau mixing old and new.

Macau is not only about Portuguese vestiges, you can also find some nice examples of Chinese architecture, such as in the A-Ma temple. Its history is by the way wonderfully illustrated in the Maritime museum just next door.

I like the way they restored the St Dominic’s Church, they kept its relative simplicity.

Here is the Venetian casino and hotel in Macau, similar to the one in Las Vegas, but bigger. The one in Las Vegas is still a little better I think; its sections are a little more diverse. It is a fake reproduction of Venice of course, and its theme has not any connection with Macau, at the opposite of the Lisboa casino. It features however an amazing number of details that reproduce relatively faithfully the ones in Venice. The entertainments inside the casino such as opera acts and classical music are of good quality and not fake at all. I’m not saying it is like Venice, but it is not a totally fake place.

If you are interested in the idea of travelling in fake places, you can also check out the artistic video I did a while ago about Las Vegas..

The “Better city, better life” official theme of the Shanghai World Fair was an excellent choice. It encapsulated all that needs to be addressed nowadays: sustainability, globalisation, urbanisation, fairness between the poor and the rich. The right questions were asked. However, the states and corporations present at the expo showed how unconvincing their answers were. Their self-interest and reliance on established industries lead them to the most desperate and risible rhetoric, see my previous posts for some examples.

The solution to all our problems is technology according to the participants of the Expo. Yet, and as far as I know, none of the big pavilions had an absolute zero impact on the environment. Instead, a splash of energetically very demanding presentations explained to the audience that some symbolic features of the buildings were sustainable, a non-sense.

Throughout my visit, oil companies, car manufacturers, heavy industries told me that their technology will bring soon a solution to the challenges that the world is facing. And the only role of the national pavilions was to repeat the absurd solutions that their biggest industries had to sell. How lower a national self-esteem could be?

The best place to experience these contradictions was in the area of the Expo devoted to industries. There, I was being told that I will have a better life thanks to bigger boats, more oil and concept GM cars; Answers that were totally inadequate and only increased my feeling of insecurity. To be fair, there were some good intentions and ideas at the Expo, and technology is surely part of the solution. But they were squeezed in an absurd vision serving national and supranational short-term interests.

In his book, Jay Winter explained how the Paris World Fair of 1937 was a desperate invocation of the illuminations of technology to prevent another war. Reality was not long to impose itself. Let’s hope that history will give us more time to resolve our incapacity to face limited resources on earth.

These buildings are huge and cold. Partly because they will need to accommodate a huge number of visitors, but still, I don’t think they incarnate the ‘better city, better life’ theme of the Expo at all. Except maybe few green credentials, which seem to me like drops of water compared to the massive use of electricity in the Expo, how would life be better in these massive buildings? The Chinese pavilion looks like it is overlooking the crowd outside. The Theme pavilion feels like an unfriendly fortress.

See my other posts on the Shanghai World Expo.

I did recently a study on verticality called ‘Welcome to Hong Kong’ that explores the imaginary of the lift in 3 vertical configurations: the lift as a ‘teletransporter’, as a ‘carriage’ and a ‘cable car’. The queuing experience and the lift itself at the SWFC are fascinating because they use extensively the lift as a symbol. According to my classification, it was treated both:

• As a high-tech ‘teletransporter’ that transports you into the future, a feeling induced by these visual 3D effects using stroboscopes for example.

• As a ‘cable car’ as I call it, that emphasizes the vertical movement and altitude. In this case, the number of meters above the ground was indicated in the lift. They also used a psychedelic visual effect simulating a kind of sci-fi tube in which the lift was moving up.

The building is beautiful and unique. And I don’t only speak about the main ‘Seed Cathedral’, but also about the way in and the way out. The Expo counts some nice gardens but you will not see many Chinese people visiting them. The UK pavilion succeeds to make the tired Chinese visitor notice nature and question its role in the future. The fossilised seeds, the artificial plants, the grey grass interrogate the relation between nature and industry, in a universal language that breaks cultural barriers.

This is a pure product of the British establishment though, with BP among its sponsors. The conceptual approach of the pavilion is in a sense insidious because it might influence more successfully an audience than a more explicit and clearly inconsistent discourse. On the other hand, it provides more freedom for personal interpretations and feelings, which might contradict the intended message of the sponsors.

Alexander Beach – Inspired Architecture from The VBA on Vimeo.

Sometimes, I wonder for whom I’m writing. A blog about art, philosophy, innovation and strategic management is not exactly what I would call a focussed approach. But it’s what I like to talk about, even if the target audience is unknown. This blog is definitely not motivated by marketing considerations but I hope it will find its public.

Thus, more news ahead. In the meantime, here is a picture of the beautiful  Driftwood in Bedford square, London. The annual summer pavilion from the Architectural Association school is not as high-profile as the Serpentine pavilion (this year from Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa), but it’s equally interesting. I like the contrast between the organic sculpture of this year and the Georgian architecture of Bedford square.

Driftwood in Bedford square

A model of London

The New London Architecture, at the Building centre, is an initiative that seeks to highlight the level of development either planned or currently underway in London.  ”Digital Cities, London’s future” was their latest exhibition. It highlights some of the resources and technologies which designers can use in the development of the city and explores areas of debate that arise alongside the opportunities of this new digital world.

The exhibition was packed with fascinating glimpses of the future.

Oxford Circus is one of the busiest spaces in London. It is negotiated by over 43,000 people and 2000 vehicles per hour (I like this use of ‘negotiated’). Any pedestrian having been there on a Saturday know it is a nightmare. People, barricades, cars, Tube entrances, everything stops you going where you want.  The solution of Atkins? Give back the freedom to move. This ambitious statement is in my opinion an excellent example of what experience design is about, brilliantly illustrated by Designhive. Some nice simulations from Aedas( I believe) were also demonstrating that a road can be shared in some cases by cars and pedestrians, without delimitations. Which is unconventional but at the same time very interesting to analyze.

Crown fountain in Chicago

There was also a presentation by UrbanBuzz on how media screens can be used in public spaces as a medium for communication. They took among other the example of the Crown fountain in Chicago, a video sculpture designed by the Catalan artist Jaume Plensa. Their point is that there are no clear guidelines on who can install big screens on the public space and how. “We will hold workshops to bring artists, planners and local policy makers together to debate and discuss the issues. We need to understand how screen technology can be implemented and to establish potential funding models.” I still wonder if the relative absence of rules and studies doesn’t benefit more to refreshing artistic approaches. Are there any mature media escaping the monopoly of advertisement?

The RUDI annual publication available for free at the exhibition is its perfect continuum, with inspiring articles in between urban design and digital technologies. Two disciplines I predict to be more and more interwoven as the Internet of Things is slowly emerging along with context aware technologies such as mobile geo-location.

The building centre has five galleries. I was much impressed by the way they were curated. I’m not sure if this is on purpose, but things were displayed in such a simple and unusual way. Some galleries looked like an architecture fair, with stands, one per company, showcasing materials, power point presentations and videos. Except that no sales representatives were there, only a desk at the end of a corridor representing all the featured fabricants.  The atmosphere was strange but I felt it was working pretty well. I could concentrate easily on what I saw. Next to those spaces were pictures of ambitious new buildings and various innovations. I liked this poster showing how much space a same number of people can take if they are driving cars, bicycles, if they are in a bus or simply walking. How things could be explained clearer than that? Here is the making-of video.

Room To Breathe

Those are just few examples of how urban design could be revolutionized in the coming years. What do you think could be the most exciting urban innovation of the future?

I didn’t realize how much Deconstructivism mirrors the hopes of our contemporary society. We progressively enter into an age where our biggest social and technological inventions are not the result of architectural plans anymore, but of spontaneous systemic emergences: Wikipedia, economic liberalism and systems like smart traffic lights are examples of self organized systems that control or at least influence our lives. Their shape is not well defined, they don’t follow any plan; they are fragmented. Because those systems are so important to us, we tend to idealize them. We want to believe that those huge, deformed monsters are better than anything we could have planned ourselves. They must be aesthetically pleasing. This is why we appreciate so much architectural deconstructivism, it makes us believe in our society.

Let me explain this more in details using the Frank Gehry pavilion. The Serpentine briefing is interesting on its own; the concept of their pavilions reminds me the Greek Agora: an open space used for assembly of the citizens. This is already a powerful statement. Are we in a society of citizen debates, open to everyone? Where are the places in London where people from all backgrounds gather in and debate? Starbucks coffees?

The open Agora of Gehry is covered by a defragmented / organic, elegant and protective root. It represents perfectly how we would like to see our society: defragmented technologies and social structures encouraging, inspiring open social debates, probably as refined and sophisticated as its structure.

Well, the pavilion’s roof might look like the result of spontaneous juxtapositions but it was undoubtedly meticulously supervised. And except the noteworthy activities organized by the Serpentine, no impromptu debates happens in the pavilion, people just go there to relax a little, maybe eating something before taking the tube back. The pavilion is a remarkable incarnation of our hopes. An ideal we can only take pictures of. But what is then the real shape of our society? Is deconstructivism a misleading paradigm or are we on our way to achieve it’s supposedly virtues? How and when?

Also to notice the remarkable urban exploration of Cao Fei in the RMB City currently exhibited at the gallery.