The architects of HK are looking to use cutting-edge technology to create designs that are sustainable and easy on the eye, even as they draw from the city's architectural heritage. Chitralekha Basu reports.

The potential of verticality remains under-utilized in Hong Kong, said the acclaimed Swiss architect Jacques Herzog recently. While Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers of all the world cities (317 at the last count), Herzog said he would like to see more creative use of height. For instance, why can't people who live or work on, say, the 56th floor have a chance to soak in the fresh sea breeze, as opposed to staying boxed up behind the featureless chrome-and-glass facades?

When it becomes fully functional next year, H Queen's could be the answer to what Herzog has been missing in Hong Kong's architectural landscape. Wedged between the escalator on Pottinger Street and Queen's Road Central, at the epicenter of downtown Hong Kong, the 24-storey building comes with transparent walls and a glass shuttle lift, allowing visitors to have a glimpse of what's on show even before they step inside any of its various art galleries. And when the giant glass panels on each floor slide apart to receive the artworks - raised directly from the road below on a gondola - the hoisting will make for a spectacle in itself.

William Lim, the managing director of the architecture firm CL3, wanted to inject a dash of playfulness among the uninterrupted monotony of the somber tower blocks in Hong Kong's central business district. "We gave a fresh twist to the office building - increased the height, reinforced the floor loading. At 3 meters by 1.5 meters, the glass panels are quite heavy but we used a new aromatic technology. It's a technological innovation," says Lim.

The space in the middle

Interestingly, architecture design in Hong Kong at the moment is as much about size as about the lack of it. Lim's own nano apartment prototype Das Haus Asia, commissioned by the International Media Marketplace, Berlin, to be their signature installation, drew the attention of Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and Secretary for Transport and Housing Frank Chan Fan when it was exhibited again at the International Design and Furniture Fair in Hong Kong in August. The two-tiered apartment is built on just 18 square meters. The bedroom fits neatly into an extended loft. The design has an expansive feel, with the asymmetric layering lending it a sense of enhanced space.

Lim says the design was a response to the negative views Hong Kong's small living spaces often attract. "It's as if it's insane to be living in these tiny units. Small apartments are very representative of Hong Kong. Besides, people the world over are increasingly living in small spaces," says Lim. "I wanted to demonstrate that small units did not have to be awful, that these could have a character."

The idea of slipping in an extra level in between the floor and ceiling seems to have caught on in perennially space-starved Hong Kong, although some architects are using the technique to make a point. The architects of COLLECTIVE, for instance, divided a standard industrial loft horizontally to create two levels, placing the administrative office on top of a meat-freezer warehouse. Far from the clinical, forbidding vibe around such an enterprise, the model, which won the silver award for environment-sensitive design of workspaces at the Design for Asia Awards 2017, looks classy, even mysterious, because of the diffused, frosty glow around its walls.

However, the COLLECTIVE team says the soft radiance was in fact generated out of necessity. The space required artificial lighting anyway, so the designers thought of using these as a way of "transforming the crudeness of the space into a clean, sterilized environment". "We decided to preserve the earlier finishing of the walls and ceiling, with their marks and imperfections; add translucent polycarbonate as a layer to tone down the harshness of fluorescent lights and the imperfection of the walls, creating softly glowing surfaces with textures," they add.

Sunny Yung, who was on the team of Hong Kong architects invited to the Venice Biennale of Architecture last year, created a model that resonates with Lim's Das Haus Asia. Yung's project "A Frontier between Standardized and Customized" was inspired by the axiom "create something out of nothing", taken from the book of ancient Chinese military tactics Thirty-Six Stratagems. Yung built miniature models of the standard Hong Kong living room and cut out sections of it, like one would slice and draw out sections in a fruit, revealing the multiple levels and activities a single floor could be made to support, in keeping with the resident's requirements.

"In school, we were taught how architecture ought to cater to individual needs and that living spaces should ideally grow out of human interaction with the environment. Most Hong Kong apartments do not support that unique relationship between a human being and the space created for him to inhabit," says Yung. "It is this loss that the 'nothing' in my project signifies."

Building with the robots

Yung's project, which subtly advocates working out need-based variations within the framework of the regular Hong Kong apartment, makes one wonder if it might indeed be possible to mass-customize these spaces by using 3-D printing and artificial intelligence - cutting-edge technologies already in use on the Chinese mainland.

Lee Ho-yin, who heads the architectural conservation programs at the University of Hong Kong, feels Hong Kong's homebuyers probably won't get to order custom-built apartments any time soon. "The absence of customization," he says, "helps developers to build faster and recoup their investment sooner, and contractors to build cheaper by less labor- and material-intensive standardization. As for the homebuyers, the demand for property exceeds supply and therefore they are not in a position to ask for customization".

Leading city architect Chan Lai-kiu says although architecture schools sometimes use robots in their projects - such as the recent computer numerical control-aided automated construction exhibition at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where a robotic arm was used to build a wall - it may be a while before the model could be made to work here at the industrial level.

Chan herself once tried to have a curved wall built using a robotic arm in collaboration with a local construction company, expecting to get a textural smoothness that the human arm was incapable of achieving. "But there was water leakage in the end. The technology here isn't mature yet."

Sharing creates more space

The tradition of families sharing common living spaces in this city goes back to the last century. Immediately after the liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945, sharing of spaces became a necessity as there weren't enough self-contained units per family to go around. The uninterrupted common balconies in Hong Kong's generic tong lau buildings, built between the late 19th century and the 1960s, were a great place to socialize over doing one's daily washing.

Today, sharing a space in Hong Kong usually means living in subdivided flats. It's a risky, unhygienic, illegal and psychologically jarring practice with nothing much to recommend it by. And yet, the city's architects today are looking at the notion of shared spaces through a fresh lens, trying to take advantage of the values inhered in them.

For example, Nikki Ho's presentation at the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture was an assortment of furniture configuration ideas - suggesting possible ways in which a tenant could open up part of his private living space for shared use in a subdivided unit. Making a case for creating a common social space within a private development, Ho argued that by giving up an area earlier used for non-essential functions, it was possible for the tenant to have wider and more varied use of it. Besides, such demonstration of caring for others was bound to do wonders for community bonding.

Memories worth using

Designs produced by the architects of Hong Kong today often work equally well as works of art. Earlier this year, the legendary architect Zaha Hadid's disarmingly elaborate and detailed sketches of Hong Kong's Peak, done in the 1980s for a project that never materialized, were exhibited at ArtisTree. In these apparently architectural drawings, Hadid seemed to move seamlessly from 2-D to 3-D and back, playing with dimension and perspectives in a way that harks back to the lithographs of M.C. Escher's twisted staircases and anticipates Christopher Nolan's film Inception.

Hong Kong's own Aden Chan presented a panoramic display featuring 150 old fish tanks with glass walls and rusty iron frames, sourced from his ancestral home in Sheung Shui at the last Venice Biennale of Architecture. The house, marked for redevelopment, will soon go down. Chan collected wedding photos, objects of everyday use, plants and sundry other things linked to the house. He also shot fresh images and video footage, putting this assortment of memorabilia inside the glass cases, one in each.

"The idea was to try and rekindle the memories around old buildings, but it goes beyond just sentimental value," says Stanley Siu, the chief curator of the Hong Kong in Venice show. "Sometimes old buildings come with unique architectural features which are still functional and relevant."

Lim, an artist and art collector in his own right, is also keen to point out that an architect's vocation is never quite dissociated from the human factor, even when he takes his work to the level of fine art. "I think the difference between art and design architecture is that people could put a practical value to the latter - for architecture could inspire some practical thinking about their living environment," he says.

Contact the writer at basu@chinadailyhk.com

(HK Edition 12/28/2017 page11)