Sony Devabhaktuni

This book examines how reading, writing and criticism can address the urgent issues faced by architecture as it is practiced, taught and studied today. The publication is drawn from an international public symposium organized in the spring of 2017 by the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. From Crisis to Crisis reflects Hong Kong's ongoing transformation from a gateway between China and the world, to a regional hub opening up a new milieu for the cultural, economic, and intellectual resources of Asia. The HKU Department of Architecture is part of this ongoing transformation, attracting thinkers from Asia, North America, Australia and Europe to engage in critical, relevant dialogues. The publication reflects this diversity and is characterized by its flexibility, contingency, vitality, and open-endedness. With contributions by Anthony Acciavatti, Chris Brisbin, Sony Devabhaktuni, Françoise Fromonot, Seng Kuan, Xiaoxuan Lu, Jonathan Massey, Graham Brenton Mckay, Kamran Afshar Naderi, Angelika Schnell, Eunice Seng, Nasrine Seraji, Zhi Wenjun, Tao Zhu, Seraji, Zhi Wenjun

Curb-scale Hong Kong is about the infrastructural objects that constitute the street in Hong Kong. Through drawing and text, the book renders these objects visible and argues for their relevance as story tellers and civic protagonists. The book opens an alternative imagination of infrastructure and asserts the importance of the ground to Hong Kong’s urban realm. The book is structured around measured plan drawings of five streets in Hong Kong. The drawings represent stopping points in a desire to draw everything. This impossible task resulted in documents suspended between narrative and a stilled, abstract distance. Details of growth, error, decay, undoing, and repair provide a register of happenings and becomings. Each drawing speaks of an entanglement between the objects and agencies of Hong Kong’s urban realm. A second axonometric index names and examines these objects, registering more closely the material and technical decisions that give them their qualities. Texts that accompany the drawings are coincident descriptions; they thicken the street plans and index. Longer-form opening and closing essays situate the curb-scale within architecture’s contemporary engagement with infrastructure and with the practice of architectural drawing.

In rural China, an informal wave of building catalysed by economic and social developments has rendered some villages unrecognisable. This building boom, taking place in a context of limited regulations, has created densities more often found in urban areas. At the same time, the rapid transformation of rural villages has generated some remarkable hybrid experiments where rural builders use generic construction methods to adapt, modify, graft, cleave and wrap traditional vernacular typologies. These typologies have existed for hundreds of years and represent an accretion of localised building knowledge and cultural identity. Where often these typologies are preserved and maintained as tourist destinations, this book looks at those instances where families transform them to account for new ways of living. By looking closely at these transformations, As Found Houses identifies innovative, informal design responses that negotiate between traditional housing forms and the changing conditions of the rural village. The book presents the intelligent and surprising solutions applied to house typologies conceived by builders in 4 regions of rural China. Using photographs, axonometric drawings and interviews with the villagers who live in these hybrid experiments, the book situates design solutions within the context of their larger human narratives, thereby challenging ossified understandings of vernacular architecture that treat historical and cultural tradition as static. The book argues that the manifold evolution of the vernacular is part of the every-day practice of the villagers' lives, and that architecture for them is very much still a home. As Found Houses is a guide to the surprising design decisions found in the domestic architecture of rural China and a resource for thinking about contemporary design.