Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City

January 20, 2019

Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City

Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City
Kowloon City Expedition (photos and statements), Terasawa Kazumi (drawing), Hiroaki Kani (supervision)
Iwanami Shoten, July 1997

Publisher Description:

Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, known as the "Toyo Daimon", was dismantled in the schedule of return from the UK to China, but in the building which grew like a maze, 50 thousand people lived there. Based on the materials of the group of architects who entered the survey before dismantling, it is the first large picture book to reproduce the ultra high density space with a large section panorama and to clarify the whole picture. (via Google Translate)

dDAB Commentary:

Early among the hundreds of drawings in Drawing Architecture is a fragment of a large, complex section of Kowloon Walled City (KWC), the ad hoc, lawless, dense agglomeration of up to 50,000 people that was demolished by the Hong Kong government in 1993. I was glad to see the drawing facing Mies van der Rohe's famous Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper Project and among other iconic and more familiar architectural drawings. Like others, I went through a KWC phase and in the process created a web page (since removed from my website but visible on the Internet Archive) about its history and "architecture" and bought nearly a handful of books on the place. One of them is Grand Panorama of the Kowloon Walled City (often called, incorrectly, Kowloon large illustrated online), which I was fortunate to find at Kinokuniya in Tokyo during a trip to Japan 15 years ago. (The book is rare, but these days it's easy to find online.) Although the text is entirely in Japanese, the photos and drawings make it understandable to just about anybody.

The book is a documentation of KWC by Japanese students shortly before its demolition. The book starts with an aerial view (first spread below) of it in 1992 and then shows the wrecking balls in action on the following spread. A smaller aerial view from 1973 reveals how KWC was a cluster of buildings that eventually congealed together, as if the buildings and its residents were striving for maximum density. Next is the section, covering eight pages on four gatefolds. Although the eight pages cannot be viewed all together, the middle two gatefolds open into a 40-inch-long fragment. (A hi-res snippet can be found here.) With a page size of more than 14 inches tall, each floor is just under an inch tall and people are about a half-inch tall. Even though the students visited KWC when it was abandoned (a photomontage section after the drawing reveals the empty, brightly painted rooms), the section is full of life, packed with belongings and with people depicted having sex (KWC was known as a place of prostitution), cooking, cutting hair -- even a child standing on a table to urinate off a balcony. The section is about a real and imagined KWC, but it's also a summation of cities in general: people living their lives in close proximity yet unaware (for the most part) of what's happening on the other side of their walls.

Spreads: