Time to watch the infamous Kowloon Walled City, built in Minecraft – Huge

The Kowloon Walled City, considered the densest settlement on Earth, was demolished in the mid-1990s. At its peak in the 1980s, it was home to about 33,000 people (government surveys offer some ideas), but estimates are usually close to 50,000. This all falls within a total area of ​​2.6 hectares, or only about 6.5 acres. This is an area smaller than five American football fields or about 2.5 New York City neighborhoods.

The city of Kowloon Wall is an infrastructure and legal accident that began with a military outpost of the Song Dynasty and then became a fortress of the Qing Dynasty in 1810. It is located within the borders of Hong Kong’s Kowloon City, and the fortress was eventually controlled by the British after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842. But the British never really did a lot of things at the site, and for decades only a few hundred people lived there. In 1940, there was only one central government office – a school, a house would eventually become a huge and overbearing city.

Kowloon Wall City continues to attract us today because there is nothing on its scale and most likely never again. For an architect who passed by Sluda, building YouTube on YouTube, this amazing, dense metropolis stimulated a well-crafted Minecraft project. Starting from scratch, including a surprising level of landscape, usually not read clearly in the photos, he meticulously rebuilt the city’s skyscrapers, mezzanines, internal access, roofs and alleys.

Many of the buildings of the walled city are almost connected, with temporary doorways and halls so thoroughly interconnecting that one is said to be able to go from one side of the city to the other without having to walk outside. What space outside is limited to narrow passages, enough for people to walk.

While there may be countless contemporary legal violations happening here today’s architects and engineers, the city has emerged again due to a governance plague, as it falls into a legal gray area. Restrictions appear in the form of a limited space.

The British did not have much involvement with the walled cities and then began to declare jurisdiction in the mid-20th century. Starting from 1945, refugees from China’s civil war began to proliferate, and by 1947 at least 2,000 people settled. By 1950, this number had grown exponentially as the 1950 fires destroyed homes of more than 17,000 residents. But the metropolis have been growing there.

Sluda’s project highlights the structural complexity of Minecraft’s bright and neat Kowloon Walled city. He was attracted to the idea because not only was the settlement infamous and historically fascinating, but it also had a strange aesthetic charm that was difficult to fix. He wanted to explore why this effect was.

“These are serious high-rise buildings, some of which reach 14 high-rises, but are built from scratch in a vernacular style, such as in communities of human scale, such as those in Rio de Janeiro,” Sluda said. “In just one building, the huge character and personality is enough to be unique and fun, but visually side by side with 50 other colleagues, all of which are unique – for me, it’s a major part of the city becoming so iconic.”

See more Minecraft projects on Sluda Builds’ YouTube channel and Instagram. You might also like the city photos captured by Romain Jacquet-Lagrèze or Hitomi Terasawa’s current “Guide to Modern Printed Illustrations” and comes with beautifully cross-departmental.