Curb-Scale Hong Kong - by Sony Devabhaktuni (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Kong's 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 architecture's contemporary engagement with infrastructure and with the practice of architectural drawing.