Cities of Repetition: Hong Kong’s Private Housing Estates

New York and Hong Kong are dense, intense vertical cities. In this truly international webinar, architects and educators Jason Carlow, a professor of Architecture at the American University of Sharjah, UAE and Christian Lange from the University of Hong Kong, will describe their joint study Cities of Repetition. Their book provides a powerful, comprehensive, graphic documentation and analysis of the largest Hong Kong housing estates built by private developers from the late 1960’s through the early 2000’s. Their images both illustrate the ultra-dense, mass-produced, highly-repetitive built environments in which hundreds of thousands of Hong Kong residents live but also capture the subtle differences in the variations of repetition.

After their presentation, the speakers will be joined in dialogue with NYC housing scholar Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, and Museum director Carol Willis for a discussion of the comparative housing models of New York, Hong Kong, and other cities where repetition is both a development and a housing strategy.

Jason F. Carlow & Christian J. Lange
Jason F. Carlow and Christian J. Lange are architects and educators. As colleagues teaching housing studios at the University of Hong Kong, they developed a keen interest in housing, high density urbanism, and the relationship between building code and architectural form. Carlow is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Architecture at American University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates. Lange is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, where he serves as Director of the Fabrication and Material Technologies Lab and leads the Robotic Fabrication Lab.