Shaping Macau's un-purposed space - design in context

For the past 20 years, Macau has been my context: I have been practicing architecture in this city in partnership with Rui Leão. My main relationship with the city is one of observation. Looking at a map of the Macau Peninsula, two features are immediately apparent: the compactness of the city grain and the lack of formalised public spaces. There is also a third, non-evident physical characteristic, which is the extreme density of certain areas of the city: the byproduct of continuous demolishing and rebuilding over the original city grain, where the plot size and its relationship with the city grid stays unchanged, but the height of the new volume increases two- or three-fold, sometimes even more, changing the street profile dramatically. In this over-densified environment, plots are systematically emptied and rebuilt, interstices are filled in, and additions to old buildings as well as the re-purposing of spaces are common. As a result of the neo-rationalist training I received in Milan in the 1990s, together with strategies I had employed while at university to operate on the city continuum, I responded by analysing the structures of my new context, Macau, and designing accordingly, adapting to the local dynamic while pushing forward an agenda of fulfilling the programmatic request of the project in such a way that extra space could be gained within the allowed volume of the design. This space, which I call un-purposed, is my contribution and a gift to the city. I am not only able to fulfill the economic expectations of the client through the understanding of local building practices, but am also able to give back precious empty areas to the users and the city by organising the program in a more orderly way through experimentation with different building typologies. I see the programmatic part of the design as a three-dimensional mass of spaces that need to be fitted together as a volume. I execute the design exercise of organising the mass of the building in the aim of increasing the size of its empty spaces. This technique has developed into a strategy of separating mass from void both in our urban designs and our interior projects. As a consequence, I can identify the independent programmatic volumes in a series of projects irrespective of their size or purpose. The objective of this strategy is to structure the building volumes and free space for an informal and non-strictly functional use. I propose that this volumetric composition is a specific answer to the questions that the physical and cultural context puts forward whereas the specificity of the response is a consequence of my identity as an architect. I discovered these void areas by redrawing my projects using the figure-and-ground technique, coloring the programmatic areas of the projects white and the empty spaces black. I concentrated on the characteristics of the black negative spaces of the drawing and later called them ¿voids¿ because they lacked a specific function and were physically empty. However, I was confronted with the fact that the definition was semantically negative and therefore unproductive to the discourse, as it failed to explain the nature of the space. This motivated me to put myself to the task of assessing the value of these spaces. I started by questioning their essence, both in my personal understanding and in their use by the local population when existing in the public domain. The common spaces I design have a formal intention and therefore do not constitute a leftover in the design. They are spaces in their own right. In the overall economy of the project, they exist to separate and organise the mass or functions of the program, in a similar way to that of the connecting tissue in the human body, which bonds muscles and organs. Functionally, these common spaces work mainly as circulation spaces, although they also serve as free areas for air, light and greenery, and also for public life to happen. The common characteristic shared by these spaces is that are all un-programmatic; they are not part of the design brief and are designed for flexible use. In the projects developed prior to the PhD investigation, the voids were the breathing elements of the design - flexible spaces that could be appropriated by the user at will. In Barra Public Transport Interchange (PTI) and Light Rail Train Station 12, the two projects that were developed during the candidature, these spaces started to gain the importance of a civic space. By the end of the research, I have postulated that these spaces may be un-purposed by choice of the designer, a modification of the current urban typologies as a test of the appropriation capabilities of the community. In Macau, I was able to observe some leftovers of the city fabric, which may have unplanned configurations, but have a lot of communal usage. Even without a specific function, these spaces are used to perform daily rituals such as sitting and chatting, playing chess, doing tai chi or bird walking - activities that no longer have a place in the new, functionalised and profit-driven urban development of the city. I further postulated that in Macau, due to the development of a profit-driven urbanism, a schism existed between the cultural identity of the population, its traditional urban spatiality, and the urban development that is actually taking place, a schism that may be due to the Portuguese urbanism that was imprinted on an East Asian city. I realised that the un-purposed space in an urban context is a public space that lies in between the formal and functional and the informal and flexible. This led me to reassess the traditional Chinese village, its informal urbanism and the urban culture behind it. It became clear that my typological shift was of a cultural nature. Traditional courtyards, piazzas, arcades and streets are not part of traditional Chinese urbanism, hence the semantic problem in naming the spaces. Taking inspiration from the informality of local Chinese urban culture, I define these spaces as "un-purposed".