Silan Yip

Journal of Undergraduate Research
Volume 6, Issue 7 - May/June 2005

The Vertical Arcade: Searching for Benjamin’s Flâneur in the Contemporary Urban City

ABSTRACT

The typology of the arcade, as critiqued by philosopher Walter Benjamin, first emerged in nineteenth century Paris, as an architectural response to the development of capitalism, industry, and ultimately modernism. The arcade, the forerunner of the present day shopping mall, is a glass corridor that covers the narrow passages between the two sides of commercial storefronts. This research tracks the offspring of the arcade that exists within the contemporary context of Hong Kong and proposes that the podium buildings proliferating in the New Territories of Hong Kong and the Central district’s escalator are architectural typologies that have emerged as descendants of the arcade. The architectural qualities of the arcade that exist in the podia and the escalator are critiqued and then transplanted in the contemporary context of Hong Kong in the form of a design proposal for a vertical arcade. In a place as dense as Hong Kong, the pedestrian experience of the arcades described by Benjamin, one that primarily relies on occupying the ground plane horizontally is not sufficient. The proposal for a vertical arcade thus explores the possibilities of sectional dwelling through the transformation of the arcade. Spatial programming and architectural form are reconsidered as means to explore emergent urban experiences in a hyper dense, culturally hybrid place like Hong Kong.

BACKGROUND

The modern pedestrian experience emerged in nineteenth century Paris out of the development of capitalism and the implementation of a new city plan by Baron Haussman. The pedestrian was transformed into a character who occupied the street as a social event, rather than as a means to a destination. The arcades emerged during this period to house the new commodities that were a by-product of capitalism and industry. Just as the arcades were being erected, they were replaced by the first shopping malls, such as the Bon Marche, or being cleared for the implementation of Baron Haussmann’s Grand Boulevards. The Grand Boulevards were large-scale streets that cut through Paris, creating large vistas of the city. What remained following Haussmanization was a small collection of arcades or passages that served as pedestrian thoroughfares as well as commercial centers throughout the city. The arcades were significant because they held frozen the scale of the pre-Haussmann urban fabric of Paris, a scale designed specifically for the pedestrian.

Figure 1. Passage des Panoramas in nineteenth century Paris (Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, pl. 381).

Figure 2. Passage des Panoramas January 4, 2005. Photo by author.

The Paris arcade is the forerunner to the modern shopping mall, being the first architectural structure that housed the selling of mass-produced commodity goods. The arcade provided an enclosed public space that housed individual commercial shops. The success of the arcades and the subsequent success of the shopping mall relied on the revolutionary development of a glass-covered ceiling over a narrow store lined street (Figure 3). The addition of a glass roof provided protection from rain and cold while also allowing light to penetrate the interior. The arcade is also significant as one of the early users of gas lighting, allowing it to be one of the first urban public spaces occupied at night. The arcade became a model for privatized space that was open for public occupation, a concept that would emerge in the shopping mall and re-emerge in the podium building. The public now accessed the arcades for entertainment and as a place of social gathering instead of using the covered street only to get to a destination. Louis Aragon’s peasant from his novel Paris Peasant thus spent his time in the arcade, dining in its cafes, monitoring the changing women’s fashions that were displayed, and observing the crowds, rather than using the arcades as a mode of circulation.

Figure 3. Glass ceiling of the Passage des Panoramas

The arcades were fueled by capitalism, because they were an architecture that emerged as the narrow pedestrian streets of commercial passages housing the new dream world of capitalism and the commodity good. In Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects capitalism is described as “a natural phenomenon with which a new dream sleep fell over Europe and with it a reactivation of mythic forces.” (Benjamin 391). The dream sleep is a construction of a surreal urban experience, where “freedom comes from the imagination” and should not be limited to “rational, waking logic” (Breton 433). The dream sleep awoke a desire among the working classes and the new bourgeois class for commodity goods. With the development of capitalism, the dream worlds of modernity appear in the arcades (Buck-Morrs 271). The arcades housed the dream world by providing an architectural, public space to fetish the commodity good. Although the masses were not necessarily able to afford to buy the new commodities, such as the peasant from Louis Aragon’s surrealist novel Paris Peasant, they were able to access them in the arcades and consume them in the dreams of their desires. Thus, the arcades thus created the surreal urban experience, one where rationalism gives way to psychic automatism.

ARCADES REAPPEARANCE IN HONG KONG

The arcade is a container that isolates its inhabitants, putting them in a world of spectacle, and removing them from the reality of the city that exists outside of its boundaries. Within the context of Hong Kong, the container for inhabiting the dream world has emerged in the form of the podium building (Figure 4). The podium is a large- scale building, housing a shopping mall of up to seven stories that encompasses commerce as well as public amenities. The so called podium is named because the shopping mall component serves as a podium for the high rise residential towers that sit on a transfer slab above the shopping mall (Figure 5). The spatial diagram of the podium is in many ways similar to an overgrown arcade. The bottom levels of an arcade also house commercial shops with residential apartments on the upper levels. The main objective of the podium building typology, as described by Hong Kong Council of Social Service, was to “encourage the formation of a vigorous and ‘balanced’ community in which people of all ages and income, and of diverse interests and values can live and develop socially, while having facilities conveniently provided to meet their basic needs, i.e. their employment, shelter, health, education, safety and recreation.” The podia were an attempt to relocate people from the urban core of Hong Kong into the New Territories, but resulted in creating a disjuncture in their lifestyle. New Town podium buildings initially left people displaced from the urban core, which developers have attempted to remedy by artificially inoculating what they believe to be socially stimulating programs, such as shopping malls and fitness gyms inside its skin. The addition of these programs within the podium part of the building serves to further segregate its inhabitants with the city outside.

Figure 4. Podium buildings in the New Territories of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

Figure 5. Transfer slab of a podium building at Tung Chung Station, Hong Kong SAR.

The need to develop the podium building has arisen from the extreme densities of the urban core and the consequent high cost of living. Hong Kong has an overall density of 16,102 people per square mile (6,095.9 people per square kilometer), which accounts for the 40 percent of undeveloped land. When considering just the population density of Hong Kong’s urban core, the density jumps to 96,758 people per square mile (37,358.66 people per square meter). The Kowloon district reaches a density of 117,778 people per square mile. Manhattan’s Upper East by comparison has a density of 109,000 people per square mile. The extreme densities have resulted in a high cost of living. The average price of a small two-bedroom apartment in Hong Kong is 3.5 million Hong Kong dollars or 450,000 US dollars. The average rental price for the same apartment is about 18,000 Hong Kong dollars per month or 2,400 US dollars. Buildings must maximize the greatest usage of land for the most people, causing architecture to develop vertically, resulting in the creation of the podium tower. The podium is a formula for efficiency in square footage. Architects pack the shopping mall component as well as public services and living in the building so that the single building can have a small footprint and still have a large quantity of sellable square footage.

Capitalism and commodities dominate the social and much of the architectural aspirations of Hong Kong. “The purpose of Hong Kong is to make money. Hong Kong has no other public, moral, intellectual, artistic, cultural, or ethical purpose” (Ng, M.K., and Mills). Its financial aspirations are realized in its role as a world- trading partner. In 2003 Hong Kong ranked eleventh for in exports and imports and is currently the world’s largest port container. Within the context of Hong Kong the social ramifications of commercialism and the commodity good have affected the role of architecture and the architectural typology of the place. The podium building is a reaction to Hong Kong’s fixation on commercialism and is a descendant of the arcade in its role of housing the commodity and forcing its inhabitants to fetish the commodity good, if only subconsciously. The podium building is the creation of a habitable container for consumption with a constant supply of consumers. For the inhabitants of the podium building, there is no escape from the dream state produced by capitalism; they must indulge just to get to their apartment.

The podium, much like the arcade, created a self-contained world, a microcosm of the city. Separating the pedestrian from the city and placing him within the dream world of the podium causes, according to the Hong Kong Council of Social Service, a loss “of identity and feeling of insecurity.” The complete existence of someone who inhabits the podium is one of isolation from the city. Where he works, goes to school, and sees the doctor is all part of the same shopping mall that is his dwelling. The street penetrated the original arcade, seeming to flow from the exterior of the street into the interior and connecting it to streets on the other side. The podium, however, touches the ground abruptly, destroying the human scale, so an occupant is discourage from traversing its outside boundaries. Most inhabitants leave the podium either by car or more commonly from the train system located beneath the building. The street pedestrian rarely occupies the immediate exterior of the building. Just as the podium traps its inhabitants within the podium of a shopping mall, the arcade (contrary to its fluid appearance) stopped the movement of the pedestrian by trapping him within the depths of the shopping streets.

In Paris Peasant Aragon discovers that people become trapped inside the arcade because they are fetishing the wish-image and the spectacle. The arcade like the podium is a coffin, a container for spectacle. As Susan Buck-Morss, author of Dialectics of Seeing, explains, “All of the errors of the bourgeois consciousness could be found there (commodity, fetishism, reification, the world as ‘inwardness’), as well as (in fashion, prostitution, gambling) all of its utopian dreams” (39). The effect of the being submerged in the spectacle heightens the visual stimuli. The pedestrian is constantly forced to consume the commodity visually, and consequentially in a dream state. The commodities are shoved together to create a surreal effect because they are a haphazard juxtaposition of the found objects inside the arcades (Buck-Morss). The omnipresent display of commodity goods creates simultaneous experiences of desire and loss. The arcades were “the precise material replica of the internal consciousness, or rather, the unconscious of the dreaming collective” (Buck-Morss 39). Not all that was offered to the bourgeoisie in the arcades could be attained, so he was automatically put into a dream trance where the haunts of his desire could be consumed. The podium exaggerates these effects of desire and consumption, because people live inside this dream house.

Where as the social ramifications of the arcade are most prevalent in the podium buildings, the spatial diagram of the arcade is most closely associated with the Central district’s escalator (Fig 6). The escalator, the longest in the world, is 800 meters long with 20 elevated walkways and 3 moving walkways. Much like the arcade, the escalator carves through the city in plan, but also works in section along the edge of the city’s slope. The escalator is public infrastructure that was created to enhance the pedestrian experience. Until ten o’clock in the morning the escalator moves down the hill to help people get to work and then switches direction to help people move up the hill to their homes after work.

Figure 6. Central district escalator.

The spatial diagram of the arcade is analogous to a sky lit tunnel. The narrow passages create a unidirectional itinerary. The Passage des Panoramas, for example, was a promenade of approximately 400 meters long and only about three meters wide (Figure 7). The arcades carve a sliver of space that emphasizes the experience of the one point perspective, which frames one event at a time. The pedestrian is forced to view the arcades in one point perspective, a contrived, rational mode of operation (Figure 8). The perspective, however, becomes distorted from the application of reflective materials. The glass from the roof above and in the storefront displays, and mirrors in the arcades create a series of reflections from all directions (Figure 9). These reflective surfaces also mirror the materiality of the arcades, which replicated the unconscious dream state of the collective (Buck-Morss 39). The reflections produce a phantasmagoric spectacle, where the reality of the narrow space “opens up to him (the flâneur) as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room” (Benjamin 417). The urban experience in the arcades created a “complex shifting image beyond that of their material existence” (Vidler, Warped 74).

Figure 7. Plan of the Passage des Panoramas (Geist, Arcades: The History of the Building Type, pl. 373)

Figure 8. Unidirectional experience inside the Passage Jouffroy, January 4, 2005. Photo by author.

Figure 9. Reflections from a storefront inside the Passage Jouffroy, January 4, 2005. Photo by author.

The visual experience in the escalator fluctuates from moments of strict one point perspective and moments of parallax, a shift in how surfaces that define space are arranged caused by a change in position of the viewer (Holl, Steven 26). For all the social and experiential shortcomings of the podium as a descendant of the arcade, the escalator attempts to correct these faults. The edges of the escalator, unlike the podium, are more transparent and porous. No part of the escalator is actually bound from the exterior. Although the edges of the escalator are bound by storefronts one can penetrate these edges through the many side streets. The dream world of the commodity wish image exists in the stores along the escalator, but the escalator does not directly touch the edges of these stores. Also, the escalator is in constant motion, never allowing spectators to visually indulge in them for too long.

The escalator forces the one-point perspective as much as it produced a three-point when looking up or down and two point when looking out as the escalator moves along the side of the island. The changes in the perspective are phenomenally more perceivable because the pedestrian can just look when he is on the escalator without worrying about physically moving himself. The perception of shifting perspectives creates a cinematic experience of the city, revealing shifting vantage points, broken horizon lines, and fractured memories. The escalator produces the phenomena of inhabiting the city through framed views without removing the occupant from the city.

Intervention: Vertical Arcade

A vertical arcade (Figure10) was proposed as an architectural typology that would address the shortcomings of the podia and utilize the qualities of the arcade prevalent in the escalator to create an appropriate architecture for the Hong Kong context. The notion of verticality is used as a tool to test the possibilities of occupying dense environments such as Hong Kong.

Figure 10. Model of the vertical arcade design proposal

Programmatically, the vertical arcade shares types of spaces with the podium. Because of the density and the high property values, the vertical arcade is a tall tower that leaves a small footprint on the ground. Within the vertical arcade, commercial spaces and public amenities are woven within residential units to provide variations inside the tower. Unlike, the podia, the uses are not stratified to different floors, but are mixed throughout the section of the building. The central core of the tower is designed as a circulation core reminiscent of the qualities of the escalator. A series of circulation types move throughout the core including escalators, stairs, ramps, and elevators. Much like the Paris arcades, the vertical arcade serves as pedestrian infrastructure that lends itself to occupation as route of circulation. Spread throughout the building the circulation core expands and becomes moments of larger scale occupation, such as outdoor park space (Figure 11).

Figure 11. Outdoor park space folding out of the vertical arcade tower to create a continuous ground condition that moves from the interior to the exterior of the building.

The vertical arcade is an attempt to address the problem of the pedestrian’s disconnection from the street and the city by eliminating the podium understory so that the building can function like a city by operating, on a smaller scale, as the city at large. Residents of the podium never have to leave their building. To address the separation of the inhabitant from the outside life of the street, the street and the city fold into the building via the circulation core. Public and private spaces are dispersed throughout the building, just as they are in Hong Kong. Pedestrians are given a more varied itinerary within the building, so that they do not feel as if they are merely living within a shopping center but are, rather, part of a community.

Entry into the vertical arcade consists of a street that folds out of a pedestrian street and becomes the circulation core. The vertical arcade must touch the ground in order to break the isolation from reality that was problematic in the arcades and the podium. Also, the base of the tower is directly connected to the train system and streets for cars. (Figure 12)

Figure 12 Base of the vertical arcade where the street folds into the building.

The vertical arcade provides an interior pedestrian path that folds into itself and back out. The path of the arcade is articulated through vertical movement as well as through spatial knots (Figure 13). The spatial knots, intended to provide larger scaled public zones within a given section of the arcade, also serve to suspend the pedestrian within the realm of the tower building.

Figure 13. Spatial knots spread throughout the section of the vertical arcade.

Because the arcades were experienced in plan, through a straight tunnel, they were perceived as framed views in one point perspective. The vertical arcade, because of its sectional quality, is perceived in a simultaneous flux of varying perspectives. Inhabiting the spatial knots and traveling on the escalator exaggerate the changing perspectives. The circulation cuts through the building in section with differently scaled moves, allowing for shifting perspectives. The shifting perspectives creates the phenomena of spectacle within the building that heightens the spatial experience of occupying the building rather than creating a spectacle produced by consumption.

The impact of the Paris arcades on architecture and the social climate they created are still relevant today. The arcades typology plays a critical role in creating a relevant architecture in a dense, modern, metropolis. Linking the escalator and podium as a new, unified architectural idea, this research attempts to describe the qualities of the arcades in order to develop a building typology adaptable to the dense and emerging capitalist climate of Hong Kong, without causing the social disjunction created by the original form.

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