Carol Abroad: Refabricating City (Part II)

Picking up from my previous post about the Hong Kong & Shenzen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture Exhibition, we took a leisure stroll at the exhibition site, the former Central Police Station, that night and saw a lot of interesting display. Even though we stayed there until the last minute before the exhibition closed for the night, we still ran out of time to go through the entire thing =(

Anyways, let me show you some of the exhibits that I found interesting...

The Exhibits

Buildings and neighborhoods cut out of wood, cardboard and other materials; displays of model cities

Story of how an architecture is born...

Mike got lost among the photograph racks...

Dark room with hanging.... magazines?!

How architecture has evolved.... from this.....

to this......

From Rooms to Rooms...

Almost all of the rooms in the compounds were used for the exhibition. People toured from rooms to rooms.

Stepping outside from the rooms, you can easily see the open area outside and the giant LCD screen right next to the stage at the front.

Special lighting effect, in preparation for the party held on the closing night!

Tools used to create the magical light effect!! Pretty "heavy-duty-looking", ain't them?

Behind the stage.

Walking through the hallway, going to the next room....

Vertical Park

Novel idea of a "Vertical Park"

Main idea is to fully utilize the distinct characteristics of a High zone, Mid zone and Low zone in a mountain area and turns it into a park that spans vertically.

Very cool and ingenious idea!!

More Urban Architecture...

Whoo... the "mirror" room!!

The reflection from the mirror created such an interesting perspective.

Oh, Hi There!! ^o^

Oh my gosh~ Mike's larger-than-normal eyes looked exactly like the alien's eyes on his shirt!!!

The Tree City

Recycling Art

Pullable rack containing various recyclable materials

Plastic bottles...

Paper, paper bags....

Sea of green labels...

The Balloon Tent

An elongated tent built with balloon materials....

What's there?!

This is what I would call a "Photographer's stance" (hohohoho.... )

Another mirror?!!

Next building....

There are many buildings in the compounds. After seeing stuff at the first building, we moved on to the next one.

Corridor to the next building

A very old, rusty metal door...

Apparently the male changing room used to locate on this building!

And the female changing room too!! Wait a second... why doesn't it have a proper sign like the guy's one?!?!

Old style of fan switches!! So... historic!!

Old style clothes rack, and also, the "Save electricity" label on the wall.

Warnings left from the former police station.

Central Divisional Common Room. Wondering what facilities used to be in this room?

The Airport Exhibit

This exhibit was all about the history, info and future plans of the Hong Kong airport.

Look at all the paper planes hang from the ceiling!!

Gigantic model in the middle of the room, showing the area around the old airport.

Mike stole the DSLR from me and was busy taking pictures of the model.

Even the little kid was attracted by the huge city model.

I was busy reading the background info of the airport.

Since Mike "borrowed" the DSLR, I was stuck with the point-and-shoot for awhile.

Hehe... finally swapped the DSLR back and returned the little point-and-shoot to him!

The paper planes were so pretty!!

Black and White Poster Section

This room was filled with tons of black and white designed posters. Most of them had a satire theme.

I like the way they arranged the poster boards.

DisneyLand? or DizzyLand?

A map of overly-overlapping metro routes and the poor, confused guy in the middle.

Kowloon King's graffiti, the artistic version?!

The happy panda!!!

Chinese chess board, divided by Vic Kong (Victoria Harbor's Chinese short name), Hong Kong

"Hong Kong Mountain, Hong Kong Sea" - built (or destroyed?) by the cranks...

Mike said he really liked the last one!

Exhibit from Brussels

Besides local and mainland-China designers/architects, the exhibition also featured a bunch of international artist's works, including this one, from Brussels.

The goal is to relieve the heavy traffic in Brussels city center. The idea is to create this kind of small, golf-car like vehicles and only allows traveling by this kind of vehicles in the city center, i.e. no normal cars allowed!

The idea sounds crazy but I thought it is interesting.

Though I bet it's close to impossible to actually implement it.

This one design was from a Japanese architect. (sorry, didn't read the details for this one)

Broken Keyboards

Going up the stair, we surfed around the third floor as well...

And we found in this room .....

Sea of old keyboards!!!

A very shocking scene (to me at least...)

Could help but crouch down to take close-up pictures of the old, broken keyboards...

I guess something does have to be sacrifice when we go "urban"....

Another "demolition" art!!

Accidental Urbanism

How modern architecture is shaped by urban forces instead of just purely stylistic approach.

Models created based on refabrication through strategy and urbanism.

Looks pretty "urban" to me.

Jumping to Modern Abstract Art

Walls of bags, handbags, purses..... Made me think of "The Evil who Wears Prada".... haha...

Walls of T-Shirts.

"To be Confirmed" Exhibit

The title of the exhibit was really cool...

Graveyard of the "unconfirmation"?!

More Abstract Art

Contemporary Chinese Architecture

I really enjoyed this part too. They showed many cool-looking contemporary Chinese architecture on the interwoven photography strips.

Mike reading closely the poster board on the floor with embedded LCD TV!

Shortly after he lost interest in reading, he found another "him"!! =)

And don't ask me what was I doing at that time!!!

You could see/smell/feel the "historical values" of the police station compound... I was very glad that I got to see the exhibition and the building itself!!

Time to Leave

We spent lots of time looking at each individual exhibit, so we ended up running out of time and didn't even get to see the closed Victoria prison =( That's my biggest regret!! Oh well....