"Architecture Is... Art" Festival

The Architecture is...Art Festival is a festival for all public to participate. It is oragnized by some theatre organizations, architecture institutions and professional academic bodies. The aim of it is to promete architecture to the public, and at the same time voice out the orgin of architecture that it is a part of art, it should follow the concepts of art and its relations to public spaces, urban planning, living environment and living standard.

In modern cities like Hong Kong, all spaces in the city is occupied by high-rise residential building and sky-scrapers. We can hardly see the sky and breathe in some fresh air. The fuctional of architecture changed from improving human's living standard, to only concerning economical factors like receiving the highest land rent and use as much as space we can. This really manipulates and violates the original principal of architecture.

The festival put some exhibitions in the Cultural Centre in Tsim Sha Tsui. It introduces some famous architects in the history like Louis I. Kahn and Mies Van Der Rohe. It tells the audience about their concepts of architecture and contributions to the society with interesting and relaxing media such as comics, graphics, sketches and installation arts. They also invite some famous actors and singers to participate in order to arouse public concern. As I would like to do research in architecture in my MPhil degree, I have visited all the exhibtions, enjoyed the perforamance arts and theatre acts and participate in the seminars.

The second part of the exhibition is about Chinese architecture. It tells us about traditional Chinese building and urban planing principals. It shows these serious and difficult knowledges in a much relaxing, interesting and interactive way. It uses many digital shows, interactive softwares to show the former architectures' relations to Confucian, religious beliefs, humanities and social status classifications.