The project is produced as part of the M.Arch II Thesis program at YSoA between January-May, 2023. During the week of 12-19 February, I traveled to Hong Kong to decipher the layers of different points in the city, and to understand what seperates Hong Kong from other global cities in terms of its every day life.
21st century’s global cities are crystallized through hard infrastructures of transportation networks, residential towers, resource flows and international finance laying out a uniform fabric. Migrations, economical precarities and administrative uncertainties coupled this fabric with an additional layer of softer infrastructure of third spaces built by and for non-clients. This project aspires to unfold the already established layers of Hong Kong where hard and soft infrastructure plays out together drawing the unique locality of the space. With a lens on visibility and centrality, distribution of power and politics in the urban set, the visual narrative of Hong Kong tries to decipher and expand the ways in which the city responds to the political turmoils, to the distance between the state and people, private companies’ extractive capacities and public’s everyday life. In understanding the managerial ways that support one-to-one intimate relationships and dialogues between the agents of urban environment, the architectural proposal speculates on the socioeconomic and political thresholds urban environments prescribe.
Questioning what constitutes the global city around the questions of patterns, infrastructures, population and diversity, the project responds through hair salons— yet not using hair salons as a mere multiplier in the urban scheme but as a spatial condenser of the urban geopolitical atmosphere. Hallucinating on hard and soft systems of the global cities, the project searches for a more robust feminine visibility within the city, as the incorporation of personal experiences and histories helps to disrupt traditional masculine power structures within architecture.
