Fall 2022, Spring 2023

Y2 architecture studios, HKU

Tianying Li

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A house is a shelter. Against the nemesis of indoor space: water, modern architecture works as a submarine that shields it outside while leaving portholes to appreciate it from a distance, unable to tame the weather out there but capable of retaining the bubble of the comfort zone inside. 

A house stabilizes the indoors and resists the water, the everchanging otherness, through careful deployment of architectural components that control and eventually aestheticize the traces of water. The pursuit of “being in control” has been one of the core themes in modern architecture whose actual boundary remains ambiguous and fallible.

 

Spanning a complete academic year, the design task in the first semester was situated on a speculated landscape traversed by a seasonal creek. In the second semester, the studio took Sam Ka Tsuen (三家村) as the site, a fishing village affected by floods during yearly typhoon seasons. They each problematized water from above and below, treating water as both a resource and a crisis for architecture.