rocker-lange blog

Rocker Lange Architects have been recently featured in a video by the Wall Street Journal called “Architects Tackle Density in Hong Kong”

The creativity of architects and designers from around the world, applied to imagining a brighter, more efficient city, is on display at the Hong Kong architecture biennale. WSJ’s Diana Jou talks to chief curator Anderson Lee to get the scoop on some of the most fascinating projects.

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.

Rocker Lange Architects are participating in this year’s Hong Kong & Shenzhen bi-city biennale with their proposal for a new urban furniture concept.

Hong Kong’s urban furniture contains multiple functional objects. Each of them belongs to a different set of formal expression or is part of a different style. While variation is obvious in the style mix of Hong Kong’s public furniture, there is a lack of uniformity in the formal expression that could foster a unique Hong Kong identity..

This design proposal for a contemporary city bench seeks to understand the concept of street furniture as a holistic design problem. Instead of offering only one single static design, this scheme suggests multiple varying solutions that meet specific fitness criteria.
The project “Urban Adapter” is based on a digital parametric model. At its core the model utilizes explicit site information and programmatic data to react and interact with its environment. That way the model’s DNA structure is capable of producing a variety of unique furniture results. Together they generate an endless family of new urban bench furniture.

Rather than having a fixed form the members of the family can adapt to different site conditions and programmatic needs. While all of the designs have the ability to serve as a seating element, some have additional programmatic values added, such as recycling containers, flower buckets or billboards serving for advertisement or educational purposes. The generated functional surface invites the user to new seating and communication arrangements and establishes a unique identity for the urban space of Hong Kong.