Photographing the zones of contact between the multilevel metropolis and the mountain.

Hong Kong is relentlessly vertical, a city of towers and skyways, elevators and ladder streets, built on a mountainside — a city without ground, according to the architects Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong. In their guidebook to the three-dimensional circulatory networks of downtown Hong Kong, they draw a city that has radically abrogated its relationship with the ground plane

Axonometric diagram of elevated pedestrian circulation systems in Central Hong Kong, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (2012),
Axonometric diagram of elevated pedestrian circulation systems in Central Hong Kong, from Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook (2012), © Adam Frampton, Jonathan D. Solomon, and Clara Wong

    It’s a beautiful, insightful book, but its sense of gravity is all wrong. For no matter how deeply you lose yourself in the aerial labyrinth, how many escalators you ascend from sea level, how many building portals you pass through, inevitably the mountainous terrain of Hong Kong Island rises up at a faster rate. The levitating pedestrian bumps into the hillside and is brought back to earth. In Hong Kong, the ground is everywhere.

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