Parallel works: learning from Hong Kong and Asia as a foundation to expand an architectural practice

What lessons can be derived from a careful reading of Hong Kong's residual urban spaces, and how might this inform a method for generating spatial projects? At the core of my architectural practice is a desire to reflect on voids, buffer zones, and thresholds within the East Asian Coastline region. I have observed that the city can be seen as a system of thresholds that oscillates between the classical duo of inside/outside, public/private, legal/illegal. I have realized that owing to their ambiguous status, this condition opens up multiple ways of interpreting the physical and metaphorical limits between the solid and void and allows the city to breathe. In particular, the metropolitan area of Hong Kong has been a testing ground to explore the notion of spatial ambiguity at different scales - through in-situ observation, and interventions in the process of making architecture. From my observations, my readings of the city, I have derived a set of values, qualities, or characteristics that I then transpose or use to inform architectural and urban projects. How I read the city and write back into the city reflects my attitude to architecture as well as reflecting what I value in the Asian city and what I have come to value architecturally. This led me to question an architecture that tries only to fill every space it encounters. Instead, through patient and vigilant observation, a new spatial proposition could emerge from the re-articulation of the existing built environment. The challenge is to transpose teaching from the outdoor liminal space, characterised by its lack of control and its organic qualities, to the shaping of space in controlled situations, and projects. Therefore, I am proposing a set of techniques called design principles that synthesises my learning. By defining the void, interlocking space, expand boundaries, overlap functions and be frugal with material I am putting forward values, rather than a recipe that could be applied step by step.  This work reflects what I see the Asian city is, can be and what can then be added into it and contributes to providing an original approach of reading and writing the built environment. To this end, the work presented here argues that the action of reading the city is not merely a passive approach, but rather an active process of constructing a narrative; in other words, reading is a way of acting.