Parasitic Hybridisation – Office Home

A.Thesis Title

Parasitic Hybridisation – Office Home

“For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.”1 – Christopher Alexander

B. Thesis Statement

Office home, a self-reliance building typology highly integrated work/live model, will be an alternative planning instrument for new town development in a mature metropolis like Hong Kong in view of the over dependence on peripheral supports and the lifeless working environment.

C. Description of contexts and key ideas driving the thesis

New town developments in Hong Kong ran the risk of over-reliance on peripheral employment. It became a failure after the transition of social model in the 80s, the secondary industry started moving to the Mainland China, and it gradually emerged as a commercial and financial center in the urban region. The situation of local employment raising social red flags. The industry has long been the heart of urban development down the age. If office establishes as a stronghold in the rural district, these new job opportunity not only diverse the workplace from the central business district; but also can be a place to take rest or even a place to stay in once the old mindset of separating work from personal life has been changed.

However, Hong Kong is reaching an architectural threshold with its limiting programs hybridization in view of the weak fragmented stacking system; the programs run independently among vertical separation method. Especially in the office tower, Hong Kong has the longest working week all the world over, they need to work over 50 hours per week in a sterile atmosphere. Officers seem trapped in the glass prison under lifeless working conditions due to lack of leisure space. All the recreational area was placed at the bottom part of the building. The thesis eschews conventional stacking methods and instead investigates the potential of a programmatic parasitic hybrid approach as the principle of a complexity, lifestyles of health and sustainability office replanning model.

The project conceives of a parasitics hybridization, a mutualism relation between work and leisure space, to a rural area next to Ma On Shan.

D. Description of Project Intended to Test the Thesis Statement

1. Urban Planning in Hong Kong

Tseung Kwan O’s new town Planning

Tseung Kwan O’s new town development adopted the theory of tree structure for the urban infrastructure. All the things are connected under single or unidirectional way thought podium and tower approach; each part of the building only contain a single function, shopping arcade at the podium with the over hanged pedestrian footbridge for the connection with another tower system, and the dwelling are in the sky. The fragmented urban fabric contains lack of overlapping units between each program.

2. Infrastructure within vertical city

Highrise, directed by Ben Wheatley, 2015

As a legacy of self-sustain 40 stories luxury tower during the 1970s, residents became gradually uninterested in the outside world since the tower block provided everything that they need. This is an extreme case to show the weakness of stacking hybridization for the highrise. The building will descend into chaos once infrastructure begins to fail.

E. Methodological Processes/ Outline of Reseach/ Design Experiments

“A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.”2 – Martin Keidegger

Working efficiency vs Lifestyle in office

The thesis elaborate the idea of parasitics hybridization though the word, connection. By setting a constraint about working area must set boundary from resting area in order to maintain work efficiency. Conventional wall and slab system will blunder with a clear spatially and visually boundary between the programs.

A new life pattern will be induced by blurring the boundary though structural hybridization;which will achieve the goals of spatial connection and visually disconnection in the same space.

For office space, the structure must evolve to maintain rigid long span open layout with sufficient natural daylight for flexible layout rearrangement .

For the leisure space, it will be hanged onto the surface of office space through different parasitic patterns to investigate different interaction. Advancing from the legacy of Frederick Kiesler’s “endless surface” tectonic approach. The leisure will be formed by a single surface which allows ample light to reach every corner of the room without broken up by corners. Moreover, semi-lattice surface creates a subtlety connection with its host through its various size of opening.

“All ends meet in the “Endless” as they meet in life. Life’s rhythms are cyclical. All ends of living meet during twenty-four hours, during a week, a lifetime. They touch one another with the kiss of time. They shake hands, stay, say goodbye, return through the same or other doors, come and go through multi-links, secretive or obvious, or through the whims of memory.”3 – Frederick Kiesler

Endless House, Frederick Kiesler, 1950

F. Annotated Bibliography/ Precedents

1 Christopher Alexander, “A city is not a tree”, (Architectural Forum, 1965), P.22

2 Martin Keidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, (New York, 1971) P.6

3 Frederick Kiesler, “1890-1965 Inside the Endless House”,P.52