The second return of Hong Kong marks the end of “one country, two systems.” With it comes a displacement of the city’s population, like the brain drain that prompted the Berlin Wall erection. The Hong Kong airport becomes a precarious spatial-geopolitical threshold over which the specter of a second Cold War looms. The Norman Foster architectural and engineering marvel, once a symbol of pride signifying Hong Kong’s free and open society, now devolves into a set of fragile pearly gates that struggles in its promise to provide egress to the world beyond. The thesis probes the air terminal for the underlying sociopolitical, historical, and psychological vectors that converge at this increasingly critical border crossing. Peeling away the physical veneer, it seeks to deconstruct the spatial-perceptual stench for the underlying caries. It probes the realm of the intangible of border-architectural spatial experiences in an age when telaesthesia perpetuates traumas, and traumas foreshadow memories of the future. The tangibles of the monumental are pitted against the intangibles of the feeble. In the manner of an autopsy, the immersive game medium would be experimented as a tool to externalize the departed’s afterlife as well as honor its unfulfilled glamours, shortchanged by arrivals long predicted.
