MArch Studio Spring 2024, Human Intelligence Program, University of Hong Kong
Teachers: Joshua Bolchover, Kent Mundle (with Jersey Poon)
In contrast to developing regions, the developed world is calling for a moratorium on new buildings, with a renewed emphasis on adaptation, and the limitation of the use of high carbon intensity materials such as concrete. However, in emerging regions these questions are suppressed in the urgency to build as cheaply and as quickly as possible. The studio advocates that developing regions, particularly those with rich historical urban fabric, need to initiate an alternative model of in-situ incremental change.
In-situ interventions, growths or transformations enable settlements to adapt to emergent urban conditions without displacing residents, dismantling social networks, or destroying local urban fabrics and artefacts despite the turbulent change. However, to intervene in-situ requires a situated approach that is tailored to the given context and embedded with local intelligences from the social, to the cultural, and the material. The integration of these intelligences implies a capacity and role for the architect that is decisively human due to the inherent ambiguities, uncertainties, and latencies of these contexts. How spatial prototypes and material systems can offer new possibilities under these circumstances is not something that can be automated or made artificially, and thus must be cultivated by the discipline.