Around the same time, in a much more upscale corner of town, the owners of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel built a footbridge to take guests directly into the Prince’s Building shopping centre across the street. This inadvertently sparked a revolution in Hong Kong’s urban form, as pedestrian space was untethered from the ground level; in the words of architect Jonathan Solomon, Hong Kong has entered a “condition of groundlessness,” when public activity is spread vertically as well as horizontally: there are public parks on shopping mall rooftops, buildings with multiple main entrances and ground floors. You’re as likely to find a restaurant on the 10th floor of a building as at street level. Walking through Hong Kong requires a constant change of grade and elevation, from ground level to footbridge to tunnel.
The best visual representations of Hong Kong come from those who understand its essential verticality. In the 1950s and ‘60s, photographer Ho Fan masterfully depicted this urban palimpsest by capturing the city’s filtered light, staircases and imposing shop signs. More recently, Benny Lam’s series of overhead photos of people living in subdivided flats evoked the makeshift living environments familiar to so many Hong Kongers, whose tiny apartments force them to stack themselves on bunk beds and pile their possessions on towering shelves. And of course, there is Michael Wolf, the German-born photographer who has achieved international recognition for his series Architecture of Density: dispassionate images of Hong Kong apartment towers, cropped so as to give the impression that they are endless.