Here is a series of three artistic videos around the theme of verticality. I made them while I was in Hong Kong in May 2010 to complement the Welcome to My Place video collection and my researches on the philosophical concept of place. While I visited many cities in my life, Hong Kong is a particularly striking vertical experience, because of its density and uncompromising modernisation.

“Concentration” (soundscape by hanstimm), see description here.

I have been inspired to work on the subject of verticality while reading the book ‘La poétique de l’Espace’ (The poetics of Space) by Gaston Bachelard, and more specifically this translated quotation:

“In addition to the lack of vertical intimate values, one needs to add the lack of cosmology in the houses of big cities. Houses are not there in nature anymore. Relations between home and space become tacit. Everything thereby becomes machine and private life leaks from everywhere.”

Houses and their phenomenology have been studied for a long time. Apartments and vertical buildings are more recent. They still have this image of being the second option, not the ‘real’ home. Reality from Hong Kong looks quite different. What is the imaginary of verticality?

My intuition was to start from the lift: a key component that differentiates vertical buildings from horizontal ones. The small room mediates verticality for its guests and is where its negotiation occurs. I could also have chosen the escalator, another important mediator of verticality in contemporary buildings. But its affiliation with stairs makes it somehow a less original feature, even though many things could be said about its cultural function. The lift has no precedent and reigns in spaces of verticality.

The lift is typically a small room in which guests cannot do anything else than to press on numbered buttons. It never has any seats and is thus not a place to stay; relaxing background music is sometimes played though. The lift might celebrate its own movement, and by extension the verticality of its building, by having large windows giving to its outside. But it denies most often its mobility and doesn’t feature any window. Which doesn’t prevent the image of the long and dark vertically corridor to appear mentally in the passenger’s mind (see the imaginary of the Disney’s Tower of Terror ride for example). The lift feels at the same time a private place, having mirrors that guests can use to check their appearance, and public, with surveillance cameras and the knowledge that everyone on the outside can check the lift’s movement. The ambiguity leads to well known sexual fantasies, breaking also the predictive and functional role of the room.

Through evolution of technology, the lift reduced to the maximum freedom of its passengers. They need to accept its rules if they don’t want to use the stairs. The lift decides who is next, when to open and close the doors, to go either up or down. This generates a lot of frustration and contempt, along with angry insults when the lift is slow to act on passengers requests. They generally accept the rules though because they believe that the lift has been programmed for the best of their interests. Even if they might sometimes doubt that it is intelligent enough to achieve the task.

The lift, and vertical buildings, can be perceived in three different ways closely related to social practices.

Lift as a teletransporter – verticality is a multi-dimensional space

The lift is a teletransporter. It connects a particular location on the ground to a space where people live in the same habitation at the same time, but without knowing the existence of one another. This is what I tried to convey in the following video that was made at my apartment building in Mong Kok, the area with the highest population density in the world (see here a map of teletransporters around the Olympic station, not far from Mong Kok).

“Antechamber” (soundscape by Geography)

This imaginary can only remain if habitants of the building have no significant contacts between one another. If they had, vertical distances between one another’s floor would break the multidimensional representation of space. They are living in the building because they greatly value the location of its entrance, not their neighbours. It might be justified and I don’t necessary make of neighbouring a virtue.

Another interesting aspect of this subjective representation is the emphasis on the ground location and not the verticality of the building, as illustrated in the “Concentration” video. What is the most fascinating in a skyscraper? Is it its height? Or is it the importance given to its location? Why thousands of people would want to be teleported everyday at the entrance door of a single building? While there are so many other geographical coordinates to choose from on earth? The massive appearance of a skyscraper is the material expression of the importance of its location. My video suggests that such a disproportionate interest in specific locations is due to a phenomenon of concentration, a door becomes highly desirable because of the importance given to doors next door. This remains true even when the original singularity becomes anecdotic, and when concentration in itself becomes the significance. The harbour of Hong Kong brought in financial institutions, employees, consumers and finally advertisers.

Lift as a carriage – verticality works just like horizontality

In this representation, the lift is a vertical carriage that goes from one door to another in a long vertical corridor. It doesn’t differ substantially from a horizontal corridor. The vertical building is one that is turned 90 degrees. A sense of proximity with neighbours is possible in this configuration, and all being in one single corridor provides a feeling of equality. But maybe vertically is not the best configuration then. The lift becomes an inconvenient means compared to simply walking to see a neighbour for example. Other considerations are at play: the ones explained in the previous and next chapters, and maybe additional benefits that verticality can bring to the community, such as wider park area (see the Unité d’habitation from Le Corbusier in Marseilles, a ‘vertical village’).

Escalators offer a compromise in a vertical place that doesn’t want to be. Take the huge Langham Place vertical shopping mall in Hong Kong. Its extensive use of escalators, some of the longest around, smoothes the visit that doesn’t need to be interrupted by lifts. The escalators make the place feel more like a horizontal one, more adapted to wandering and temptations.

Lift as a cable car – power in verticality

The lift is a cable car that makes it easy to climb distances sometimes higher than of mounts. Vertical buildings are inspired by human verticality. They allow an overview of a territory and its control. The higher you can see the more power you can exercise on the territory and its people. I’m not a big supporter of analogies between skyscrapers and the phallus; I think sexuality is the mirror of life and not the inverse. Human verticality and the desire of power are in my opinion better justification for vertical buildings.

At the difference of the mounts altitude that has been set once for all by nature, there are no limits for skyscrapers and engineering. You might think you are at the top, but you soon realise that it was only the top of one social group or class, and then new heights are being built every day. Higher standards for wealth and social status are being set, which paradoxically don’t increase the number of people who can see the uninterrupted horizon. In a funny argumentative twist, horizontal space becomes more valuable than vertical space: only matters the uninterrupted horizon you can see from your eyes, not what is below and above you.

I had the idea to incorporate video game elements in the next video after reading Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark, and more specifically this quotation:

“A higher level is essentially more than a lower level. And so there’s nowhere to go but to more, and more, until there is no more, and the gamer, like the character, is left with nothing.”

The video narrative also strangely reminds me the 80s animated series Cocoshaker by Jean-Charles Meunier, except that the next coconut palm is always higher!

“Elevation”