Architecture Design Year 4 Studio 2016-17 Semester 1, HKU
Studio Title Communal Micro – Housing: Living Small in Big Congregation
Image Credits Jeanie Chiu & Nathan Sin (05-06), Charlotte Ge & Leona Peng (01-02), James Sun & Maggie Wang (03-04)

 

Context 

Micro-housing, a new form of residential development has become popular around the world for the recent years. A major draw of micro-housing is location. Especially for a limited budget, the proximity to a city’s center makes the sacrifice of space worthwhile.  With its compact building size and site coverage, and its affordable renting cost, this type of housing is often where young single people want to live. Could micro-housing possibly become a solution for the housing problem of Hong Kong, where the property value constantly ranks world’s no.1 and the developable land in the city center is a scarcity?

This studio will look at communal micro-housing design with three fundamental questions:

1. How micro can it be?

• The majority of people in Hong Kong live in compact apartments. For young single people here, what is the smallest acceptable dimension of a private unit?

2. How communal can it be?

• If the rentable private space is targeted to be pushed to the minimum, what kind of functions and spaces could be possibly shared as communal space outside of the private unit?

3. How to re-define efficiency?

• The circulation space in housing is often targeted to be minimized as it reduces the efficiency of floor plan. In fact it constitutes to an essential part of our residential living experience. Can we challenge the conventional notion of circulation space and synthesize it with other functions in order to form an “efficient” component?

Methodology 

This studio intends to explore communal micro-housing design with a bottom-up approach. Students will first analyze precedents primarily on 4 fundamental elements: circulation, unit, structure and threshold, then explore the possibility of transforming these design strategies into the scale of micro-housing units by integrating various unit types with circulation and communal spaces. Finally student will synthesize all ideas into an overall mid-rise slab block as communal micro-housing.

Program

The overall building type to be scrutinized for this studio will be the slab-block. Students are required to synthesize all precedence analysis, design extractions and experiments to form a micro-housing design within the domain of a generic mid-rise residential block (45m(L) x 9m(W) x 27m(H)) with various site conditions.