Four Tigers Market

The most salient characteristic of the architectural solutions of the shops and restaurants in the city is that they make a direct reference to being owned or run by East Asian immigrants. In the case of shops, this rarely goes further than advertising the store as Chinese on the signboard, while the architecture is hardly different from that of other businesses in the neighbourhood. They, however, use the available space the same way as one can see at markets - characterised by a conspicuous density of goods, a highly efficient use of space - so often the merchandise itself becomes an "architectural" element, defining spaces or making "façades", though this of course is more striking in the markets. Similarly, restaurants restrict themselves to the use of ornaments typical of Chinese/Asian culture, the intervention always being superficial, never affecting the structure of the building; the only function of the ornamentation is to suggest that the building belongs to, and represents, Chinese culture. In the most cases, the ornamentation is made of plastic, and is ordered from one of the many Taiwanese web-shops specialized in this type of goods.

Considering the use of urban space by East Asian immigrants, we find that so-called soft systems are far more important for them than the built environment. They seek to establish and maintain social and business relations, which they can utilise for their purposes. They have a word for it: "guanxi". The result is a constantly transforming, loose system, which can flexibly respond to the changes of the city. East Asian culture and the culture of the city itself combine to produce what is the migrants' presence.

Their architecture, which is mobile like East Asian culture itself, and which is of secondary importance in relation to their social network, fills the empty spaces (defined by the immobile, heavy built architecture) of the city like a fluid, and does so without producing considerable physical or structural changes, or even provoking real interaction. This may be why this ever-changing and ever-adaptive fabric cannot be altered from the outside, retains its flexibility only in its natural "habitat", and can’t be seized by external forces. A good example is the shopping centre called Asia Center, in whose case the investment and the development came as external forces, which did not acknowledge the nature of what a self-regulating system was, and have met with failure.

Ida Kiss, Gergely Kovács, Melinda Matúz
opaq


Studies