Drag Spaces

Neil Leach

Origin: Static Issue 04
Content: Text/Images

“In Hong Kong space becomes an ever-renegotiable commodity within a rapid turnover marketplace. Forget the modernist slogan of ‘form follows function’ and the dream of spatial determinism. Homes become casinos become police stations become brothels. Slaughterhouses turn into museums, power stations into art galleries. Spatial identities are defined less by architectural form and more by the events that take place there…
Temporary spaces, temporary identities. Identity now is always a form of performance. We are the roles we act out. No longer constrained by our material bodies, our race, our gender, our backgrounds, our genetic make up and so on, we can now re-invent ourselves; we can redefine ourselves. ‘Who will you be in the next twenty-four hours?’ asks an advert in Wallpaper* magazine…” 

A version of this text was previously published in China, Neil Leach with Laurent Gutierrez, and Valerie Portefaix, Hong Kong: Map Office, 2004.

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Contributors:

Neil Leach is currently DAAD Visiting Professor at Dessau Institute of Architecture. He has also taught at the Architectural Association, Columbia GSAPP, Cornell and SCI-Arc. He is the author of The Anaesthetics of Architecture (MIT 1999), Millennium Culture (Ellipsis 1999), China (Map Office 2004), Forget Heidegger (Paideia 2006), and Camouflage (MIT 2006); co-author of Marspants (Architecture Foundation 2000); editor of Rethinking Architecture (Routledge 1997); Architecture and Revolution (Routledge 1999); The Hieroglyphics of Space (Routledge 2002) and Designing for a Digital World (Wiley 2002); co-editor of Digital Tectonics (Wiley 2004), Fast Forward>> (Map Office 2004) and Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies, 2 vols. (China Architecture and Planning Press 2006); and co-translator of L B Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books (MIT 1988). He was also co-curator of the A2 Exhibition of Avant-Garde Architecture at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2004, and Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2006.

Associated Links:

http://www.neilleach.com