The seminar consists of two parts. The first part contains a toolbox composed of minimalistic signs and symbols. They constitute the basic language of eight specific graphics illustrating significant phenomena as mentioned by Constant or Huizinga, namely; Role of play; Contest; Labyrinth; Derive; Nomadism; Desire, Atmosphere and Leisure. This part of our research is finally coming to its conclusion by posing eight provocative contra statements also supported by abstract graphics. In general, they suggest the absorption of playing man’s world by economically driven strategies.
The second part entails architectural images. In line with Rossi’s analogical way of thinking, axonometric drawings and a three dimensional model of Hong Kong’s Financial Center (IFC) has been made in the scale of 1:1000. This part of the city has been developed on landfill in the late 1990s and consist of ‘systems of interlinked publicly accessible passageways coalesce in three dimensions around the IFC Mall, a continuous medium of pedestrian traffic between ferry piers, underground rail stations, bus terminals, taxi stands, and the city beyond that renders not just the streets but the very ground of the city irrelevant… The density, connectivity, and redundancy of these networks generate new forms of public space that, to function, require neither the images of classical European or Chinses urbanity to signify a street, a courtyard, a square, nor the underlying guarantees they suggest.’ Our three-dimensional images visualize besides the spatial similarities between Constant’s imaginary world of New Babylon and Hong Kong’s contemporary reality, the astonishing discontinuity between architectural forms and their assumed representations of ideological systems.
