Hong Kong University: Deep Structure / Transversal Architecture
A huge thanks to Holger Kehne and the students of the MArch Studio of the Fall 2018-2019 semester at HKU for having me out every week to advise them structurally for their projects. It was a fun, refreshing experience and I hope you all learned as much as I did.
(Me sitting on a chair made of nothing but air and paper)
The studio focused in on a local issue – podiums in buildings. To quote the courses curriculum:
“The podium tower has gained hegemony in Hong Kong and all over Asia due to its basic fitness in combining the needs for housing and commercial spaces at maximum GFA. On the positive side this contributes to a dense and compact urban fabric, even loads on transportation and other infrastructures and the round-the-clock liveliness of many areas. Yet it is rightly criticized for a wide range of urban, environmental and social problems.”
Structurally, a podium usually necessitates a transfer structure – something that has a large impact on structural material usage and the environment. Our goal was to learn about why this is and how we can balance the need for different architectural usages whilst avoiding this structural demerit.
Professor Kehne’s students originally had the prompt of creating a chair that would represent a portion of their build’s structural system. The idea here was to be able to get a feel for how the structure worked on a small scale. The students and I got to work closely to learn the fundamental nature of how things stand up, which involved lots of testing. As you can imagine – there were casualties:
This isn’t a failure – its us learning not how to make a chair
But in the end, the students ended up with some amazing designs at the end of the semester. Here are some pictures from the studio:
