Abstract
This paper examines large development projects as a function of finance in the context of Hong Kong, taking Kowloon Station as an exceptionally revealing case. Hong Kong's property market is one of the most established in Asia, and it points to the ways in which large-scale development schemes proliferate along efficient and affordable mass transit railway systems with great speed and success. At Kowloon Station, finance redefines architecture; instead of focusing on aesthetics and community, it is now promoting standardization, market visibility and semantic control. The financial viability of these developments depends entirely on these new goals; mega-developments such as Kowloon Station – and those in other parts of Asia – are successful in inventing major mass transit railway stations as terminals, in capturing commuters within spatial enclosures surrounded by barrier-like physical features, and in terminating architecture as it has long been established as a discipline. Mega-development is increasingly reinventing the contemporary Asian city.
Terminal developments refer to a form of development in cities where large self-contained and multifunctional complexes – often stretched to the limit of density and urban infrastructure in Hong Kong – grow rapidly along mass transit railway lines. These are not small towns but made of singular developments, comprising elements of retail, offices and hotels, and residential units, often created within relatively small sites. These developments are terminal in three senses: terminals of a mass transit system, endpoints in the city demarcated by a set of barrier-like design features and, metaphorically, an end of architecture. Terminal developments are not places with design strategies to relate to other places in the city; they are destinations in deliberate isolation. The emergence of terminal developments in recent decades marks a distinct shift from a widely held principle in urban formation in the past: cities provide connective public space for public life; instead, finance plays a decisive and determining role in terminal developments. The primary forces of this ‘termination of architecture’ – architecture as we have known it for over two thousand years – gathered pace almost in stealth in the form of the rise of neoliberalism; the de-regulation of the financial markets, in conjunction with privatization, reformulated architecture as ‘improvements on land’.
For centuries, architecture has always had a double life as production of culture and storage/exchange of monetary value; from the financial innovations of the Venetian and Florentine bankers, to the ‘financial revolution’ of the Dutch Republic and the British Empire, architecture has been one of the most effective monetary instruments. One prophetic moment of today's transformation occurred after the Great Fire of London, when Captain Valentine Knight published a radical proposal on 20 September 1666 for the rebuilding of London. He divided the City of London into thin strips of 500 feet by 70 feet on average to accommodate two rows of houses (Porter, 2001: 82), and claimed that in his design ‘the ground [was] all put to the best profit’, which would earn the money-strapped Charles II £372,360 (Bell, 1920: 241). While few could afford to purchase property in the 17th century, the invention and democratization of the mortgage during the following centuries enabled a ‘mass ownership’ of property; by collateralizing loans as long-term regular payments, and by securitizing collateralized debts, mass housing has been progressively reformulated as mass and massive finance. The increasing speed of investment and return derived directly from land and its improvements has transformed architecture from something that used to cost money to something that now makes money. Money, instead of facilitating the goals of architecture cultivated by its disciplinary ambitions, now colonizes the entire body of architecture.
Real estate is perhaps still the favourite investment instrument today; it is increasingly asserting its architectural identity – its demand for market visibility, its tendency to amalgamate fragmented semantic contents, its aspiration as standard financial products, and its reluctance to historicize and theorize designs. These features run counter to the entrenched convictions of architecture in permanence, sitedness, syntactical rules, and intellectualization. The 2008 collapse of the credit system dependent on subprime mortgages demonstrates vividly the contemporary form of the mutual dependency between architecture and money. The 2008 financial crisis also highlighted the extraordinary scale and speed of global finance; the investment of collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) – financial products sold to investors with distributed risks several steps abstracted from real estate loans – are circulated around the world with unprecedented synchronicity. As the era of extra-systemic resources in slaves, spices and oil ends, financial innovations such as CDOs are crucial in creating monetary capability where there is none; architecture brings a physicality of that capability into existence. Terminal developments emerge, in this context, as one of the most effective hybrids of money and architecture that increasingly dominate contemporary Chinese cities.
Kowloon Station
Kowloon Station is, instead of a case of ‘finance of architecture’, an extraordinary example of ‘architecture of finance’. Located at the confluence of Mass Transit Railway and Airport Express Rail, as well as situated next to the high speed rail terminal linking to the high speed rail network in China, the 13.54 hectare site is owned by the Mass Transit Railway Corporation (MTRC), a government institution established in 1975 which has, since 2000, been corporatized and listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with 23 per cent of its shares owned by private investors. The MTRC has always been run like a business entity, with ‘government subsidies’ primarily in the form of development rights (Yeung, 2008: 4). Kowloon Station creates 1.06 million square metres of highly valued real estate: 16 residential towers (8809 residential units), two hotel and serviced apartment towers, a 118-storey premium office tower of 231,778 square metres of rentable space, a themed shopping mall of 82,750 square metres, 5400 parking spaces, and other associated facilities. All these development components are divided into seven packages, taken up by developers either on their own or in the form of consortia. The station was opened in 1998, and the shopping mall was opened in 2007; the last package, featuring one of the world's tallest towers, was completed in 2010. With a master plan developed by the British architect Terry Farrell and office and hotel towers designed by the American architectural firm Kohn Pederson Fox – much of this made possible by the rich experiences and astute skills of Wong & Ouyang of Hong Kong – this development has become one of the most desired locations in Hong Kong for shopping, living and working. The high speed rail terminal linking Hong Kong to China's high speed rail network ensured a flood of investors from China, who pushed the real estate prices of Kowloon Station to a new height. By 2010, the highest property price for the Cullinan – its luxury residential towers – reached 70,000 Hong Kong dollars per square foot, a historical record.
The Kowloon Station development model is a culmination of a process of experiments that produced, over a period of 30 years, other less exaggerated, but equally compelling, examples: New Town Plaza in Shatin, Marina Square in Tsing Yi, Times Square in Causway Bay, Pacific Place in Admiralty, Gateway in Tsim Sha Tsui, Taikoo Place and Cityplaza in Tai Koo Shing, Sunshine City in Ma On Shan, Festival Walk in Kowloon Tong, Langham Place in Mongkok. All these developments rely heavily on mass transit rail links supplemented by other forms of public transport, and mixed developments as destinations. All of them have been very successful in generating profit on the one hand and a form of life on the other; despite stylistic differences, they feature similar deliberate isolation from the city as terminal developments. Major Hong Kong developers, such as Wharf Holdings, Hong Kong Land, Henderson Land, Sino Land, Cheung Kong Properties, Sun Hung Kai Properties, and New World Development, have significant property developments in China; many of them follow the successful formula refined over a long period of time in Hong Kong.
The basic enabling factor that produced terminal developments is similar to that which formed the development of urban areas such as Golders Green in London in the early 20th century, when the expansion of the tube gave rise to the possibility of a new settlement area. This was a particular kind of ‘new town’ settlement, which has followed a development logic perhaps first practised systematically through the colonial settlements of ancient Greek cities; Hong Kong has adopted many strategies developed during the New Town and Garden City movements in the early 20th century, when, since the 1950s, mass migration from China caused acute housing shortages. Here, mass transit has been the key; while aiming to move large numbers of people quickly and cheaply, it creates new development opportunities. The combination of mass transit railway and shopping centres perhaps first emerged in Tokyo in the early 20th century when department stores began to offer the construction of railway stations that are directly connected to, and bear the names of, the department stores.
In Hong Kong, these first experiments have been expanded tremendously. In particular, several conditions conspired to create Kowloon Station as an epitome of the station-based real estate ideal: the capacity of developers in Hong Kong to gather large amounts of capital to develop sites along mass transit railway, the desire to create a new airport by the last British administration before the handover in 1997, the Hong Kong government's ‘state capitalism’ embedded in the institution of the MTRC, and the extraordinarily high level of public participation in real estate speculation in Hong Kong. Kowloon Station resulted, in crucial ways, from the creation and maintenance of ever larger systems of urban functions as capital investment instead of public welfare, as both a need and a consequence of international finance. Kowloon Station is a crucial part of the Airport Core Programme (ACP), first conceived by the Hong Kong government in May 1989 in the wake of the 1984 negotiations between China and Britain over Hong Kong's post-1997 future. The ACP aimed at upgrading Hong Kong's infrastructure as part of an enormous ‘revamp’ of Hong Kong; it was a massive infrastructural development which included a new airport, two railway lines linking the city and the airport (31.1 and 34.8 kilometres respectively), and five stations with commercial development potential (Hong Kong Central, Kowloon, Olympic, Tsing Yi, Tung Chung).
Among the stations, Kowloon Station is without doubt the most outstanding in scale and complexity. The MTRC secured government consent with regard to the use of airspace above stations, and was free to enter into agreements with property developers who would develop according to design standards established by the MTRC, and who share the profit with the MTRC when property is sold. The total area for commercial development of the ACP is 63 hectares, which results in approximately 3.5 million square metres of real estate space; the Hong Kong government, in the process, collected large premiums on the land/airspace sales to the order of over 40 billion dollars (Omega Centre, n.d.: 16, 77). The five development sites around five stations contributed 28,000 residential units, eight office towers, six shopping centres and almost 3000 hotel rooms (Omega Centre, n.d.: 27). As expected by the Hong Kong government, the government and MTRC development costs of these sites were reimbursed by property developers as up-front cash payments when development packages were awarded; this reimbursement was then credited into the property development.
As a government-owned and listed transportation company, the MTRC, in the years straddling the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, had been catapulted into the key role of reinventing Hong Kong. From the inception, the MTRC achieved its financial viability through unregulated train fares, a focus on high volume and profit margin rail developments, a high degree of managerial autonomy despite it being a government-owned corporation, and privileged access to real estate development rights (Yeung, 2008: 12). Despite the public disputes between suspicious Chinese and British governments over the financing of the ACP projects for many years before the 1997 handover, the MTRC had skilfully secured a profitable future for all the developments along the airport rail lines, with the help of credits from more than 170 local and internal financial institutions and banks (Omega Centre, n.d.: 85–7). In this sense, the MTRC is an extraordinary example of neoliberalism: a government utilities company that managed to be profitable throughout its existence.
Design Standardization
In the larger scheme of things, particularly from a perspective of finance, Hong Kong's Mass Transit Railway Corporation does not seem to care if there is a ‘station’ at all in urban and architectural terms, unlike those in the era when train stations such as King's Cross, Paddington, Central Station, among countless others, commanded strong and unmistakable urban and spatial presence. Kowloon Station, for all its grand claims, functional efficiency and technological sophistication, is architecturally nothing but a name; its subterranean existence has been reduced to the minimum in the forms of information boards, mechanized barriers, electro-magnetic payment systems and signage. Although terminal developments are located in the city, they do not seem to be interested in the city; they aim to capture the travelling mass for as long as possible within the development. In this sense, terminal developments are very different from the American suburban shopping mall. The American suburban shopping mall, for all its predictable banality, is a clear spatial construct – a standalone monumentality of shopping surrounded by dedicated road and parking spaces; terminal developments in Hong Kong are a set of signage-enabled internal circulation routes linking many different functions. One has little direct spatial sense as to where one enters the developments and where one parks one's car: everything seems to need a barcode and a user's manual. The architecture of terminal developments conspires to reinvent this spatial obfuscation enthusiastically; the inward-looking nature of the development is highly exaggerated by the architecture that exposes without aesthetic pretension its mechanical supply, operative and discharge systems – transformer rooms, carpark entrances, HVAC (Heating, Ventilating, and Air Conditioning) exhausts, loading and unloading bays, drop-off and pick-up zones – towards the city. This feature is both a result of building regulations demanding street access to mechanical facilities and a strategy to replace street life with interior malls. It does not need a city in order to work, just like in a hydroponic farm where plants do not need soil to grow.
The act of design, in the normative sense, is progressively replaced by what may be described as quantity management, a crucial activity that begins and ends with financial calculations. The framework for calculation is largely defined by maximum allowable quantities of real estate, and an estimated level of pricing of real estate. Under Hong Kong's planning law Outline Zoning Plan (OZP), Kowloon Station is given the status of a ‘comprehensive development’, where multi-functional developments at a quantity of an average of approximately eight times the site area (average plot ratio of eight) can be constructed; here the complex amalgamation of apartment units, podium clubhouses, hotels, office towers and premium shopping malls are mixed carefully; mass transit links, public buses, mini-buses, taxis and private cars are integrated into the calculation as the number of people and the feasibility of the development are intimately connected. All these numbers are calculated to respond to market conditions: sizes, quantity and grades of finishing of apartment units, offices, hotels, shopping malls. All these decisions – long before architects begin to ‘design’ – are guided by a myriad of consultants specializing in quantity management.
Following these quantity-based decisions, the primary task of architectural design is one that invents circulations – perhaps duplicating the circulation of the capital as its fundamental logic – in this maze of calculated quantities while fulfilling environmental, hygienic and fire safety regulations in Hong Kong. If ‘community’ featured as one of the highest design ideals for the architectural profession for much of its long history, ‘circulation’ has now taken over community as the new design ideal, one that takes architecture not as enabling settings for social life but as a crucial instrument to scale up and speed up financial transactions. Despite its height, the office tower called International Commerce Centre (IFC) is extruded from standard, formulaic, and conventional office and hotel layouts. Perhaps the deepest impact of this design by quantity management can be found in the apartment units. The sizes and grades of finishing of apartment units are very sensitive to market fluctuations, and are often controlled tightly; for Kowloon Station, the packages with apartment buildings are all designed by local architectural firms with deep knowledge and experience of the real estate market in Hong Kong.
Standardization is the key; it is the key feature that turns architecture into a financial product, with pricing levels responding to key standard indicators such as the number of rooms, floor to floor heights, direction and type of views, as well as the number of facilities offered in the clubhouses such as swimming pools, sports courts, dining and entertainment facilities. This is architecture's approximation of the manufactured goods as a system, which, since the Industrial Revolution, ‘imposes its own coherence and thus acquires the capacity to fashion an entire society’ (Baudrillard, 1988: 15). At Kowloon Station, this capacity to fashion an entire society has reached an extraordinary level. The numerical accounting of the quantity of provisions far outweighs any qualitative descriptions of spatial design; it certainly has a much stronger and more immediate impact on the pricing levels of apartment units. On the other hand, standardization reduces construction cost and time, which is crucially important to the return of investment; relentless vertical extrusion, in this sense, is designed by financial calculation rather than by the profession of architecture. The resulting skeleton from these quantity management activities predetermines the design of architecture.
Alan Colquhoun characterized the architecture of finance in the 1970s as the rise of the ‘superblock’, large and homogeneous blocks of structures in cities that no longer saw human community as its primary concern. Superblocks, Colquhoun says, are a ‘fact of the modern capitalist state’; ‘it is not simply a new type to be added to the repertoire of the city but a type of types, whose presence is rapidly destroying the traditional city’ (Colquhoun, 1985: 102). If Colquhoun sensed with great discomfort the rise of capital in architecture, Kowloon Station signals the final triumph of capital's colonization of architecture. Kowloon Station provides an early 21st-century version of the superblock, with a single project of 1.06 million square metres of space (approximately the size of Canary Wharf in London), forming part of a gigantic airport infrastructural project costing 35.1 billion Hong Kong dollars (approximately 4.5 billion US dollars), an enormous sum raised through a combination of government funding, developers’ upfront premium payments, and loans raised from more than 170 international financial institutions and banks.
Semantic Control
The management of calculated quantities at Kowloon Station is heavily manipulated by what may be described as semantic control. The rise of the superblock was accompanied by a parallel rise of the semantic content of architecture; it is as if international capital was no longer content with the version of architecture formulated by the architectural profession for half a century in the form of modernist design. Modern architecture abstained from semantic content and focused on inherent qualities of materials and structure; in the past three decades architecture, as it is transformed by international capital, has returned to semantic content as ways of creating market visibility. It is not surprising that narrative content of architecture (in the form of ‘post-modernism’) emerged in parallel with neoliberalism. Critical discourse in semantic content in architecture, such as that of Venturi and Scott Brown, gave way to a much simpler version of fragmented narratives as market visibility.
In today's architectural production, this simpler version of fragmented semantic content takes several forms. The first is thematic design; this is particularly important and effective in residential property development, where thematic content articulates a clear ‘life style’ positioning in the marketplace. From Thames Town in Shanghai to The Palazzo in Hong Kong, themed developments have become one of the favourite residential development strategies. The second is iconic design; it is in this arena that many architects have carved out a unique place, producing an endless stream of iconic architectural forms, often in contradiction with almost every cherished principle in architectural design in the past two millennia: structural logic, material properties, quality of details, logic of functions, sitedness in topography and culture, and appropriateness to climatic conditions. The Chinese version of this iconic design also takes the form of ‘group design creativity’, a strategy to gather in one place many iconic designs: Commune by the Great Wall, Foshou Lake in Nanjing, Xixi Wetland in Hangzhou, and Ordos 100 in Inner Mongolia. The third is height; the impact of a tall building is simple and effective, often with little interest in architectural design. Tall buildings are probably the most favoured investments for municipal governments and large corporations, both seeking visibility in a highly competitive environment. World events, such as Olympic Games and World Expos, bring all these strategies together to raise the profile of cities in the world. In reformulating architecture, international capital benefits enormously in terms of endless accumulation and in terms of modification of mass behaviour for the industrialization and commodification of culture and identity.
The enormous interiorized container at Kowloon Station is subject to this semantic control; it has themed developments, iconic shapes, and tall buildings. A complex set of fragmented narratives is embedded in the built forms of Kowloon Station that, together, project various kinds of desirability without a clear message. The naming of Kowloon Station already indicates the strong intention of semantic control: Union Square, perhaps hinting at the open spaces in San Francisco and New York by the same name. Architecturally and urbanistically antithetical to a ‘square’ with its massive and impenetrable volume, Kowloon Station is nevertheless narrated as an open space. On the other hand, Kowloon Station is far from pioneering in this naming act; countless massive and multifunctional developments have been named in similar ways: Marina Square, New Town Plaza, Festival Walk, Langham Place, etc. While the design of circulation replaced the design of community, the image of community now returns as a semantic layer, scenographic and controlled: mall cafes, Chinese banqueting halls for marriages, small retail shops, supermarkets, community cinemas, sports facilities, children's playgrounds, as well as security guards, mall guides and cleaners. The central atrium, ubiquitous in commercial complexes, now functions as the image of community centre, which is carefully blended with advertising, blurring the boundary between the celebration of traditions and the consumption of goods and services. The community has been transformed from one of social and cultural association to one of non-communicative consumers – investors, tenants, sellers, buyers – circulating in close proximity in interior spaces in the interest of capital.
Naming reaches a great height with regard to the identity of residential development packages in Kowloon Station, which builds on a tradition of naming as a vital strategy for residential development in Hong Kong (Lorenz, 2013). The names of the residential packages of Kowloon Station include Sorrento (Naples), The Arch (Paris), The Cullinan (diamond), all suggesting vague and distant desirability. The Cullinan, one of the most expensive residential developments in Hong Kong, also features a clubhouse named d'Oro, invoking addresses in Milan. Identities are constructed around these names, through decorative details and advertising, to evoke a sense of privilege and success, which has worked exceedingly well in Hong Kong; this success is both demonstrated by the high proportion of buyers from China and many parallel real estate schemes in China. The theming of the shopping mall, Elements, is centred around the Chinese traditional conception of five elements – metal, wood, water, fire, earth – as fundamental material elements of the universe. In Kowloon Station, the conception of the elements provides a set of decorative themes and a spatial ordering scheme for an otherwise rather generic shopping mall.
The semantic control extends to the endeavour to achieve an iconic status; in 2013, the office tower International Commerce Centre entered the Guinness World Records as the building with the largest light and sound show. It is already one of the tallest buildings in the world, and it is branded through the image of green silk, suggesting both smooth financial operations and environmental responsibility. The height of the building is often narrated as the ‘head of the dragon’, a popular way to describe the leadership position in the Chinese cultural context; located at the tip of Kowloon – literally meaning Nine Dragons – the tall office and hotel tower offers an amazing opportunity to tap into this powerful narrative. The curtain wall of the International Commerce Centre is designed to appear to be the skin of a dragon, with glass panels suggesting the scales of dragon skin, peeling off towards the bottom of the tower to suggest the tapering tail of a dragon.
These strategies of identity construction at Kowloon Station appealed to two cultural conditions: the status of labour and the power of the empire of figures. Although labour is one of the most primary human activities, the intellectual understanding of labour is by no means universal; as understandings of labour differ, both the results of labour and the conditions of labour leave indelible marks on cities. If the Greek ideal condition of man lies in ‘freedom from labour’, and if this desire for freedom from labour resulted in a distinct capitalist programme of seeking slaves from other places, in cheap labour in other places, and in technology replacing both, the Chinese conception of labour is much more inclusive and hybridized: under certain conditions, all labour and all are free from labour. The practice of employing foreign domestic maids from the Philippines and Indonesia in Hong Kong today may not have been modelled on the Western idea of slavery but on a traditional Chinese conception of servitude. Instead of becoming a class of people, foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong become part of the family through the provision of a servitude which is an inherent part of the Confucianist family structure. Within this structure, all are involved in the provision and reception of servitude based on hierarchies: sons to fathers, wives to husbands, ministers to rulers, and maids to mistresses. Strictly speaking, the bottom of this hierarchy is not a permanent and unchanging condition, unlike those of the caste system and slavery.
Confucius exemplified this servitude by speaking to the officers of a lower grade at court freely and straightforwardly, and by speaking to officers of a higher grade with restraint and precision. The formulations of the ‘freedom’ of the higher ranking officials and the ‘restraint’ of lower ranking officials are not elements of a slave and master relationship; they define freedom and restraint as conditional and relational. In this sense, if Hong Kong is a city of labour, then it thrives on endless fulfilment of the ‘identity dependency’ in the form of semantic content of architecture. In parallel, the Chinese writing system, through blending the image and the semantic sign, creates an intellectual framework that relies heavily on semantic distribution. This semantic distribution functions like an ‘empire of figures’ that projects its plastic power onto, among other things, architecture.
The Chinese word for civilization, wenming, refers to ‘understanding text’, a meaning that differs significantly from that of public space in civitas. If linear alphabetic combinations regard speech as its linguistic ideal, the Chinese writing system clearly strategizes on the semantic potential of the written sign. The semantic control in the act of naming at Kowloon Station, so fundamentally important to Hong Kong developers, is to some extent a reflection of the empire of figures in the Chinese cultural context. The semantic content at Kowloon Station skilfully combines a linguistic and intellectual framework with the demands of international capital in its strategy to create market visibility and speedy return on investments. In terminal developments, all the familiar features of simulation in the consumer society – subjectivity (fashion and alternative fashion), love (gifts and pets), beauty (cosmetics and body care), pleasure (food), courage (computer games), adventure (movies) – work at another level in response to the Chinese empire of figures.
Terminating Architecture
Chinese civilization did not conceive a distinct realm of the professional practice of architecture with an independent intellectual framework of history and theory, a legal framework of professional practice, and a system of education that prepares one for professional practice. Instead, buildings were understood either as materializations of Confucian rituals or as elements of the literary realm of the writing system. Architecture, as a discipline and as a system of education, appeared in China as a result of Western influence in the 20th century. It is perhaps not a coincidence that it is in the Chinese city that architecture has met its point of termination. Marcel Granet (1934) was deeply intrigued by a civilization that is grounded on neither god nor law. If we understand that the Chinese civilization was rooted in ritual and music which created immanent orders of propensity (Jullien, 1995) in social and political realities, then the contemporary fate of traditional ritual and music – regarded in the 20th century as features responsible for China's lack of progress – perhaps laid down the foundation for the amazing transformation in China in the past three decades. As ritual and music fragment and fade in contemporary Chinese societies, international capital now occupies the moral space left vacant. It is perhaps this condition that has contributed towards the rapid transformation and termination of architecture in Chinese cities.
Although Hong Kong has a very different past from the rest of China, it has always operated with a layer of Chinese cultural practices, and the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China brought Hong Kong decisively closer to contemporary China. Kowloon Station exemplifies the termination of architecture with its reconstituted functions of life – from artificial air to simulated subjectivity – fully integrated with systems of finance. Kowloon Station imagines itself urbanistically as a gigantic intake and discharge machine: drawing in motivated and pre-prepared consumers on the one hand, and spitting out dirty and hot air, traffic, consumption and human waste, and tired and satisfied consumers on the other hand. If capital drives urban developments, and succeeds most dramatically in terminal developments in Chinese cities, then we are confronted with a critically important emerging urban reality of which we only have a dim understanding. Kowloon Station is simultaneously a corpse of architecture and a new body of a technically accomplished, semantically controlled monetary instrument full of vitality.