AU YEUNG Sun Hei
2022-23 MArch 2
Supervisor: Prof. Holger Kehne
Inverted Realm
The traditional office model is undergoing significant challenges, accelerated by the impact of the pandemic. The relationship between home and office life is being redefined, prompting a reassessment of old office structures and processes. As a result, the office is no longer a private domain, evolving into a multi-modal entity that must navigate between the realms of public and private.
The project focuses on transforming the generic office by utilizing the influence of the ground to redefine the in-between of the office's public and private realms. The chosen site, Admiralty Centre, represents a modernist office prototype situated above a densely populated ground complex. Currently, there is a complete segregation between the ground and the office, the public and private realms, as well as a vertical and horizontal divide.
The design concept aims to regenerate an inverted public realm on top of the vertical tower, allowing public programs to occupy this space. By introducing this inverted public realm, the project seeks to disrupt the existing vertically disjointed series of office slabs and foster new relationships between the office and the public. This approach creates a new state, a complex and blurred space, where the boundaries between the office and the public realm merge, re-establishing a positive and enriching experience of the public realm.
About the Course
Course: MArch Design Studio - Deep Structure: Transformative Strategies for the Generic Office Tower
Despite its ubiquity and proliferation, no building type appears as outdated as the office tower. Discrete, monotonous, monofunctional, energetically wasteful, it offers little else to its users than a pigeonhole within a matrix of generic space, while context, the public, other programs, events, and practices of subjectivity are resolutely excluded. Vast, undifferentiated expanses of floor space constitute an active field, where potential for new social configurations and dynamic, adaptive systems are blocked by outdated and inflexible values, incommensurable logics, temporalities, and technologies. This studio will deploy the existing material reality of various office clusters in Hong Kong as testbed to navigate the complex social, cultural, and economic vectors for projecting new visions for a sustainable and inclusive city fabric. Structure’s generative opportunities will invert stratification and zoning into potent, topologically ambiguous spaces through which social and cultural concerns are to be articulated and explored.