The Hundred Porches

 

Team

Name: Leroy Cheng

Nationality: Hong Kong SAR

Institution / Company:  Project : As if

Instagram: @of_leroy

 

Name: Vanessa Ma

Nationality: Hong Kong SAR

Institution / Company: Project : As if

Instagram: @vanessaaaama

 

-HONOURABLE MENTION of Community 2050 Competition | Category: Professional

 

Looking back to 30 years ago, when the internet was still a myth to most people, urban programmes segregated in different corners of each city for efficient land use allocation was the core idea of urban planning due to the scarce land resources. However, the game has been changing gradually under the Information Era, and with the push by the recent COVID policy, the concept of places was reinterpreted – grouping people with the same purpose at the same place for work, play or study is no longer the only way works for keeping our society moving. For the upcoming 30 years with high expectation to see the thriving virtual world running in parallel, the land resources in reality can then be reallocated to cater for our original social desire – genuine human connection.

 

Regardless of the potential connections the virtual world is about to provide, our reality shall still demand social touch among individuals. This kind of interaction will not be gone even if most of our lives are to be transferred online, but instead, our living habits will cling more to our immediate dwelling environment. The range of our social activities will have been compressed to be more closely interconnected in order to keep up with our pace for living. With the highly overlapping social events, communal spaces shall then be largely welcome while they are also going to be regarded as our backyard from our virtual world. 

 

Having the adjacent IJ cutting in the center of Amsterdam, the proximity of IJplein owns most of the history of Amsterdam. Alongside the land resources release due to the compressed living pattern, an urban planner with consideration in our escalating desires in societal connections in the coming decades must embrace the chances for building up the intimate relations among all the emotions of the Amsterdammers by devising quality communal spaces.

 

The project – “THE HUNDRED PORCHES” is a socio-political experiment to attempt to add values to the community by providing enjoyable yet flexible social places meandering along the axes of the cities, following which the vernacular settlements built upon the radiant and linear patterns by the main roads and water bodies respectively in Amsterdam.  Meanwhile it also strengthens the sense of belonging to the inhabitants by the means of celebrating the history and beauty of the waterscape in Amsterdam through reorganizing and layering spaces in tiers, contributed by a prototype primarily for an inclusive social hub starting from IJplein.

 

In order to grow in different corners of the city, this prototype shall possess the quality of expandability and adaptability in the design. THE HUNDRED PORCHES uses frames and modules as the core components which can allow alterations, additions and extensions into various configurations to suit the actual site conditions and connectivity to proximity.

 

With shophouses introduced in the prototype, which may seem defying the forces from the uptrend in the virtual world, it in fact introduces resilience to the community – it provides social balance to people by preserving the genuine living experience for both the inhabitants and the visitors, which has also given these people a legitimate reason to mingle.

 

Furthermore, by also layering our daily commuting patterns, the lengths of our intended travel distances, on foot, by cycling and by driving, help strategize our optimal living densities by unfolding and air-gapping the creases on our current urban fabric and turn them into breathable spaces. That would instil vitality into our daily lives by appropriately maximising potentials in forming quality landscaping spaces around our neighbourhoods so on one hand preventing overdevelopment within the city, and on the other improving our physical and mental health. By doing so our aspirations of having community improvement in 2050 with promising development in environmental sustainability without compromising our social inclusiveness can be greatly achieved.

 

#Social Inclusiveness and Community Thriving  #Ecology and Health  #Human Connection #Flexible Social Space  #Space Layering #Shophouse

 

Jury Comments

– Vicente Guallart

By returning to the monumental forms and scales of early modernist work, The Hundred Porches creates an authoritative and engaging revisioning for the future of urban public space. There is an engagement both with the vernacular and local, and the global through mass and spectacle. 

 

– Zhang Yuxing

The architectural space system with local culture and construction characteristics can stimulate the imagination of future construction.

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