rocker-lange blog

Rocker-Lange Architects are participating in this year’s Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale with their research project entitled “Density & Openness Revisited: Recoding Building Bulk in Hong Kong”. The project will be on display until April 24th and is located in the Hong Kong Pavilion of the show.

Hong Kong’s cityscape is primarily shaped by the typology of the tower. While specifically in Hong Kong the tower is utilized as an extension of the urban programmatic user surface, the question of public space within this vertical urban fabric remains unaddressed.

The research project “Density & Openness Revisited: Recoding Building Bulk in Hong Kong” is the search for an alternative approach to think about open and public spaces in the context of the city. Instead of extruding the maximum boundary condition of a given site to determine the building mass, this model incorporates a ratio of open space in the design process.

At its core is a computational logic that calculates the amount of open space for each city plot. The rule-based model can adapt to different site and programmatic conditions and produces varying spaces and varying densities This approach offers the capacity to generate new forms of public space, semi public and private exterior and interior spaces.