Trapped in Junkspace
“Continuity is the essence of Junkspace; it exploits any invention that enables expansion, deploys the infrastructure of seamlessness: escalator, and air-conditioning, sprinkler, fire shutter, hot-air curtain… It is always interior, so extensive that you rarely perceive limits; it promotes disorientation by any means (mirror, polish, echo) … Junkspace is sealed, held together not by structure but by skin, like a bubble.” -Rem Koolhaas
In Hong Kong, where land resources are scarce, elevators and escalators in shopping malls have been more vividly played. Built in 2007, the Megabox Mall, this super cube is a typical example of a vertical business complex. Compared with suburban shopping centers in the United States, Megabox does not necessarily have a difference. Megabox provides three different themed atriums - "spherical atrium", "honeycomb atrium" and "sky atrium"; elevators and escalators instead of corridors form an internal vertical circulation system, and provides a dazzling panoramic view.
Hong Kong usually hot and humid, the sealed shopping mall sheltered us. When there is a typhoon or a rainstorm, we will be glad that to pass through the shopping mall to get to the subway station without the rain. When the summer heats up, sometimes we have to give up the streets and go into shopping malls to enjoy the free cool air. This design not only ruled out the instability of the outdoors but also ruled out any external environment that affects consumer desire.
There is no doubt that people in Hong Kong always love and hate about shopping malls. Some people hate it to destroy the streets of the community, store personality, but it is difficult to deny that it brings us a lot of conveniences. For more than a century, from Le Bon Marché to Megabox, the shopping malls of all kinds have many things in common. What would happen to the mall in 2049? Maybe nothing more than self-repetition of the present shopping center, but to play more extreme. As long as there is a parcel of the skin, it could be any shape. The escalator revolves around a huge atrium, with an infinite loop of limited internal.
Stairs from Le Bon Marché in Paris by Lix, 1875
Section of Megabox
While shopping malls and centers do provide many conveniences, would you say that those advantages outweigh the elements that are taken by it (community/ store personality, as you stated) ?
ReplyDeleteThe Megabox Mall is kind of a special example, for my thinking, Junkspace is more like the "fast food" building, which is just copy and paste, and focus on the business instead of the architecture.
ReplyDeleteThis is an interesting viewpoint on malls and I think applicable to America as well. I feel that the mall will be around for quite a while longer if it continues to evolve from the form you are talking about with the Megabox Mall in a dense context, but I think the more suburban malls are on their way out as people come back to the city.
ReplyDeleteI like the convenience that mall gave us. But I really don't like the feeling in Hong Kong's mall. It's always full of people. We enjoy the convenience so we need to endure bad feeling in junk space.
ReplyDeleteSome useful information for you to better understand the reason of the generation of these junkspaces in Hong Kong.
ReplyDeletePopulation density in Hong Kong: 6,679 people per square kilometer.
Population density in U.S.: 35.7 people per square kilometer.
"Junkspace" thus becomes one of the solutions of such a high density of Hong Kong - use every piece of the land efficiently.