Six Faces of a Socially Responsible Architect

A speech by Koon-Chung Chan at “On Home Ground: Architectural Culture and Hong Kong Society”, Concluding Forum of “Fabrica Cultura”, Hong Kong Exhibition of the 11^th Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale

Hong Kong, April 18, 2009

First I would like to congratulate the curators, participants, and all those who made this wonderful exhibition possible.

Speaking on home ground and for my home town, I must say I really like the way the exhibition frames architecture as cultural manifestations, feeding architecture straight into the rich and multi-dimensional cultural loop of a Hong Kong-always-in-the-making-and-remaking.

In my view, the exhibition successfully re-conceptualized local architecture by foregrounding --

human adaptability and contained serendipity;

willful fabrication and appropriate technologies;

artificial boundaries and self-organizing spatiality;

layered interpretations and meta-discourses;

uncanny sense of local reality and collective fantasy, desire, anxiety, fear and hope.

Alluding to the economy and high density of HK as a pre-condition to be reckoned with, the curators and participants never lost sight of the embedded experience and creative energy on the ground.

It underlined the link between practical skills and imagination, human as makers and tool-users, homo-faber, in complement to human as thinkers, homo-sapiens.

It hinted at the potentiality of architecture as empowerment, as engagement, and even as an equitable human enterprise

Encouraged by the rich subtext of the exhibition and inspired by the curatorial statement, the six categories and all 12 exhibits, I venture here to offer my personal wish list to local architects.

For the few of you who know me here, I might be considered to have done my bit through writing and publishing in promoting local architects and architecture. I always think of myself as a friend of architects and I welcome the rising interest in architecture and the trend that local architects are enjoying higher profiles and are now featured more prominently in Hong Kong. That of course doesn’t earn me the right to be an unreasonable contrarian at this occasion. If some of you may find what I am going to say not agreeable, please take my words that I mean no disrespect.

Back to my wish list. You may call it the six faces of a socially responsible architect.

1. architects as urbanists --  More than half of the world’s population now live in urbanized areas and high density living is the common fate of most people, The irony is that only with reasonably high-density urban living can humankind still hopes to preserve agricultural land and real countryside. Here HK may have a lesson or two that the world could learn from, along with our fair share of mistakes to avoid. I ask all local architects to aspire to achieving decent high-density living for all our ranks, and providing it with good public space that create a sense of place in urban living. I put forward the motion that an architect must first and foremost be an urbanist, one who cares for the city.

2. architects as communitarians – Architecture and public spaces are the anchors of communities. Architects should be builders of convivial communities, not their spoilers. Architects should build to encourage inclusiveness, not segregation. In other words, architects should be communitarians at heart.

3. architects as environmentalists -- Conserve energy yet keep the house warm in winter and cool in summer. Help us to leave a smaller carbon footprint. We should stop blindly adoring some big-name architects such as Frank Gehry, whose Los Angeles Disney Concert Hall, which sits under the Southern California sun, was wrapped in twenty-two million pounds of steel and thus heating up surrounding buildings by as much as fifteen degrees. Also, dear architects, you cannot leave environmental inputs to the structural engineers or building contractors, or the developers -- even if they want to, they may not know how to do it. It is you, architects, who must insist. Therefore I implore you, architects, to be environmentalists and to insist on building environmentally friendly architecture.

4. architects as contextualists – In the late 19^th century and early 20^th century a few very smart Austrian architect- urbanists such as Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner had advocated contextualism – that architectural design in urban areas should take into consideration its neighboring buildings and pedestrians on the street level. Their ideas inspired many architects to build some of the most beautiful European cities such as Vienna and Amsterdam. Architecture does not stand alone. Architecture is not an installation art. It has externalities. Knowing how compact Hong Kong is, we cannot afford the beggar-thy-neighbor mentality of some developments. Please don’t build anything that is pedestrian unfriendly, and don’t do any building that hurts the neighborhood. As much as you can, be a contextualist.

5. architects as occasional whistle blowers -- In the mid-19^th century, high-minded Victorian critics of Britain from Sir Henry Wotton to John Ruskin largely agreed that “well buildings hath three conditions: commodity, firmness, and delight”; commodity meaning it suits its purpose, it is the proper envelope for the activity that will take place in it; firmness meaning it stands up without cracks or stains, pieces don’t fall off, parts fit together, it looks solid, and delight meaning delightful to be looked at from without and delightful to be within. I think to most people, these criteria still stand, partly because many buildings in our age may not even pass these 19^th century tests. Bad buildings are everywhere, dysfunctional, shoddy and ugly. And behind every bad building is a bad architect. Well, maybe it is the developers’ greed or the contractors’ negligence or the government supervisors’ incompetence that makes a bad building. The bad guys cheat the consumers and deliver an inferior product. But it takes an architect who looks the other way, who does not care about the end product, for that to happen. In my younger days, there was a common view in HK that the three professions people really looked up to were, physicians, lawyers and accountants at times or physician, lawyers and architects at other times醫師律師建築師. Among other reasons, it shows local citizenry’s trust in these professions. I don’t know whether local architects as a discipline have ethical codes as physicians and lawyers. If not, peer-pressure and self-discipline are all you have, and I can understand keeping the profession’s integrity could be an uphill battle, even in HK. Still, I ask all local architects to live up to the best of your discipline and don’t betray the trust of the local citizenry, and occasionally when all corrective efforts fail and something pricks your conscience, try blow the whistle.

6. architects as archivists -- I could have used the word historicists, but historicism may have had a bad name for a few brief decades of the last century among coteries of high modernists and I am sure it still puts some architects among us today in a defensive mode. I am not dictating a style or a form to you. All I am saying is, on home ground and for my home town, I would ask all architects in Hong Kong to do your history home works. Respect what has come before you. Be innovative, but conserve our tangible and intangible past and preserve our diversity before you leave your signature or simply carry out the wishes of your employers. Be like an archivist. In short, handle HK with care.