Transverse Studio

Category: PolyU

  • building urban resilience

    City interior as hybrid landscape:
    Building urban resilience through green, blue and socio-cultural infrastructures
    Year 3, BA(Hons) in Design, Environment and Interiors
    School of Design, HK PolyU
    Semester 2, 2018
    Unit Leader: Melissa Cate Christ

    building urban resilienceCo-design workshop at Magic Lanes with residents and students of Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, 2018. Image credit: Hendrik Tieben.

    In this studio unit with 3rd year undergraduate students in Environment and Interiors Design, students learned about, tested and designed with key concepts and strategies employed in landscape architecture. This was done through engaging in a real-world, collaborative, community engagement, research, and design project in an alley stair in Sai Ying Pun, HK. Students were introduced to fundamental principles, elements and practices of landscape design and research. They utilized these skills to engage in site and detail design of blue, green, and social-cultural infrastructures in consultation with stakeholders and the general public through a community workshop and in final design reviews with site stakeholders. All projects were asked to address these five issues with respect to stakeholders and the site: 1)Hygiene; 2)Safety and Accessibility; 3) Intergenerational gathering and interaction; 4) Heritage conservation and preservation; and 5) Greening/ecosystem services/ecological function. For more information on the context of this project, please see the book chapter ‘Magic Lanes : A placemaking approach for laneway spaces in Hong Kong‘, co-written with Hendrik Tieben. The community engagement portion of this studio was conducted in collaboration with Henrik Tieben’s Chinese University of Hong Kong Urban Design Studio and Caritas as part of/adjacent to the URF funded project ‘Magic Lanes’.

    building urban resilience
    A selection of the student site and contextual research on Sai Ying Pun and Sheung Fung Lane. Image credits: SD3562 E&I students Term 2 2018.

    building urban resilience
    Mira’s project provided a minimal yet elegant intervention to address basic community feedback around sustainability and interaction. It was the starting point for the design that was later developed by Caritas and Magic Lanes. Image credit: Mirą, PolyU School of Design 2018.

    building urban resilience
    Rebecca and Lucas’s project envisioned a playful and colourful renovation which Image credit: Yu Pui Man and Kwok Chin Fung, PolyU School of Design 2018

    Background and rationale from the studio brief:
    When considering the “interiority” of the city, in particular the city of Hong Kong, it is crucial to develop tools and methods to understand, represent, and design landscapes. As our global cities attract bigger populations, demand is increasing for materials, energy, and infrastructure. Urban migration and sprawl, post industrial sites, informal settlements, and a rising number and intensity of disaster events endanger communities and strain financial and human resources. Issues of food security, bio-diversity, climate change, cultural heritage preservation, and waste and water management are becoming ever more urgent. Although global in scope, these issues require local, collaborative, community-based action that realizes existing resources, influences policy, and conditions municipal, regional and global plans. Designers can play key roles in these situations, engaging and educating environmentally aware residents and policy makers, creating dynamic public places, and facilitating solutions such as activated hybrid downtown neighborhoods and streets, reclaimed rooftops, brownfields, and vacant land, and ecologically and socio-culturally resilient and efficient basic amenities, services, and landscapes.

    Defining landscape as a type of public infrastructure, landscape can be understood as the totality of exterior environments that shape experience. In this “expanded field”, landscape practice endeavors to observe, analyze, define, and design for changing typologies of public and private space, proposing strategies and tactics that engage people in the active experience of place. Context and site, materials and systems, community involvement, maintenance, and multifunction are essential factors which can maximize the potential for city “interior” exterior spaces to become places of ecological and socio-cultural value. It is through a critical and hands-on engagement with the networks of processes (ecological, socio-cultural, operational, geo-political, economic…)
    that compose and determine the urban, regional, and global landscape, that design action can uncover solutions, create great places, and instigate dialogue about the future of our environment and the way we live.

    Keywords: constructed ecologies; landscape performance; landscape systems; green/blue/grey/socio-cultural infrastructure; ecosystem services; grading/site engineering; accessibility; groundwater; storm water; runoff; ground/soil; sun/shade; flexible programming; political, social and cultural uses; circulation; space
    and time; green streets, roofs and walls; canopies; seating; drainage; vegetation; paving; railings.

  • Inside out

    Inside out: a guide to squatting Hong Kong’s public spaces
    SD3562 Environment & Interiors Design Studio – Year 3
    School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University
    Spring semester, 2015
    Instructor: Melissa Cate Christ

    This third year undergraduate Environment and Interiors Design studio aimed to engage students in the design of situated tactical ‘interior’ interventions in the ‘exterior’ urban landscape by drawing on their first-hand experiences of an informally occupied urban environment. Please see the 2016 article ‘Inside Out: Applying Experiential Learning During the 2014 Hong Kong Protests to an Urban Environmental Design Studio Context’ for more detailed information.
    Inside out
    FIGURE 1. Transforming infrastructural spaces into places for living during the HK Protests, Sept 26-Dec 15, 2014 HK. Clockwise from top left: Walking from Central to Causeway Bay, Oct 1; Steps over highway divider, Nov 14; Recycling station at Legco camp, Oct 31; early morning domestic scene, Oct 21; Legco women’s public bathroom with shared/donated toiletries, Oct. 31; and campsites under the highway overpass, October 31. Photo credits: Melissa Cate Christ

    From the studio brief:
    As evidenced by the transformation of public infrastructural spaces into dynamic living environments during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, Hong Kong’s urban landscape has the capacity to contain and house a large number of people and provide for their needs, from the essential to the environmental to the socio-political. Beyond evaluating the success or failure of the Movement’s political demand for ‘true universal suffrage’, the occupation reinvigorated a cultural awareness regarding HK’s perpetual spatial inequality and degraded living environment. The tactical and nuanced occupation of primary and liminal spaces previously (and now, again) devoted to cars or restricted by rules and regulations to single uses is seen by this studio as a provocative starting point to imagine tactics for the multifunctional reprogramming of Hong Kong’s inbetween, abandoned, and underused or single-use public spaces.

    Questions the studio poses include: How can we use design to exploit the climate, public service landscape and structural density of the city? How are interior programs transposed to exterior spaces, or How do we live in exterior spaces? What are the basic necessities that are needed to transform an exterior space into an interior space? How are public spaces (eg stairs, sidewalks, alleys, parks, waterfront etc) used now as ‘living spaces’ and how can they be modified to allow for a higher density of living/working/eating/sleeping or How can more people occupy/inhabit the so-called limited space we have in HK? How can the design of exterior spaces as hybrid, camouflaged interiors serve to address social, cultural and environmental issues?

    This studio will problematize, explore and design for and within hybrid ‘inside out’ places. Both the practical and minimal provision of basic human needs, as well as cultural and social practices such as camping, street sleeping, goods storage and delivery, waste disposal and collection, hygiene and eating will be studied to identify and map these often ignored spaces in order to form a catalogue of their typical characteristics and locations. Students will then select typologies and a location to present their design approaches, installations, layouts and structures. The intent is to polemicize broader issues and questions about the use and potential of shared spaces in the city in order to create a better and more equitable living environment for all sectors of society.

    Inside out
    Student analysis and documentation of needs, materials and sources for living outside based on both first hand experience and site and contextual analysis. Diagram credit: HK PolyU SD3561 2015 students

    Inside out
    This student project sites a live/work artist studio in an underused alley to take advantage of existing overhead shelter and nearby public toilet. Image credit: Wong Shu Ting