Times Square
Hong Kong
China, 2013

Around Times Square in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong presents itself as a tightly orchestrated system. Illuminated signs, escalators, security, and retail floors come together in an environment where movement and consumption seem to unfold almost automatically. Within that setting, the rooftops of older buildings stand out as a different spatial order, less visible from street level, but present once the gaze shifts upward.

On some of these roofs are informal rooftop houses, small rooms and huts that have been added over time. They consist of a collage of materials corrugated metal, wood, temporary walls, extra doors, improvised piping. The whole appears less designed than grown, like an accumulation of solutions within limited square meters and strict property boundaries. These roof structures make a second urban layer legible. Between air conditioning units and water tanks appear clotheslines, plastic chairs, storage boxes, sometimes a few plants in buckets. What feels like a gleaming machine down on the street acquires above it a rougher human infrastructure, a space in which dwelling quite literally nests itself in between systems. The contrast reveals both a capacity for improvisation and the pressure of scarcity, without allowing itself to be easily resolved into a single narrative.