Curb-scale Hong Kong: Narratives of Infrastructure

(Paperback)

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Curb-scale Hong Kong is about the infrastructural objects that constitute the street in Hong Kong. Through drawing and text, the book renders these objects visible and argues for their relevance as story tellers and civic protagonists. The book opens an alternative imagination of infrastructure and asserts the importance of the ground to Hong Kongs urban realm.

The book is structured around measured plan drawings of five streets in Hong. The drawings represent stopping points in a desire to draw everything. This impossible task resulted in documents suspended between narrative and a stilled, abstract distance. Details of growth, error, decay, undoing, and repair provide a register of happenings and becomings. Each drawing speaks to an entanglement between the objects and agencies of Hong Kongs urban realm. A second axonometric index names and examines these objects, registering more closely the material and technical decisions that give them their qualities. Texts that accompany the drawings are coincident descriptions; they thicken the street plans and index. Longer-form opening and closing essays situate the curb-scale within architectures contemporary engagement with infrastructure and with the practice of architectural drawing.

Author Bio

Sony Devabhaktuni is an assistant professor of design in the department of architecture at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His research and teaching focuses on collaborative processes in architectural design and urban infrastructure.