Exœrcising a Haunted City
Name
Wong-bvyn-smarchs-arch-2024-thesis.pdf
Description
Thesis PDF
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103 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
e08f1deaf0247bf9b188330bcbda5266
Author(s)
Wong, Bryan Hon Ting
Advisor(s)
Dutta, Arindam
Date Issued
May 2024
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
With the looming threat of cultural erasure posed by Hong Kong’s repatriation to China no later than 2047, rituals emerge as the last resource sustaining the collective identity of the city. This thesis documents, through the study of local Taoist-Buddhist practices, the choreographies of rituals as a reparative tool to resist the disap- pearance of local culture. It is linked to findings from everyday domestic offerings to ancestors, annual festive performances of traumatic cleansing, and the booming clientele businesses of precautionary rites, all of which demonstrate their spatial and temporal qualities as methods to resist modern state control.
To retain the residue of pre-modern practices as a critique of socio-political turmoil, this thesis suggests an alternative design that preserves and promotes the annual ghost festival for public participation. By revising the festival’s pilgrimage route and ritual sheds, this thesis transforms the traditional nature of ephemeral scaffold- ings into permanent poles and follies. Situated along the city’s most haunted public estate, these structures are programmed as public facilities for fitness training and children’s playscapes. During the festival, they will be activated into ritual sheds, demonstrating a formal and functional contrast between the everyday and the ritu- al—from form to formlessness, exposure to closure, and lightness to heaviness.
Designed to evade institutional surveillance, these clandestine transformations preserve solidarity and identity not by emphasizing the significance of priests exorcising in rituals, but by highlighting the quotidian motor memories developed from locals exercising within. The duality of ritual and everyday movements shall exercise the ghosts of a haunted city.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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