Bringing ‘Toy Housing’ to Hong Kong

Bringing ‘Toy Housing’ to Hong Kong
Architecture studio explores new designs for housing developments

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News Staff

Next week a dozen Rice University architecture students and their professor will embark upon a day’s journey to China to see the results of their studio on display at the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Rice School of Architecture was one of only three U.S. schools selected to exhibit work in this highly respected international exhibition, which runs through March 9.

CLOVER LEE

The Rice installation, “Toy Housing,” was developed under the leadership of Clover Lee, assistant professor of architecture and principal of davidclovers. She has received many awards for her work investigating mass production and new scales of architecture, including a Faculty Initiative Fund award for her project “Scale vs. Size.”

That project, of which “Toy Housing ” is a component, investigates and analyzes the urban housing developments and prototypes being created because of rapid industrialization and urbanization in China. The project launched the Rice School of Architecture China Program, of which Lee is the director.

“It’s important that architecture schools don’t just focus on the regions that surround them,” Lee said. “There is so much to be learned by going beyond those boundaries. For instance, the new urbanisms in Hong Kong allow us to teach and research things we couldn’t have if we only focused on Houston.

“Scale is about experience, it’s not strictly quantitative,” Lee explained. “You need to experience it to see how it fits into the larger context

New urbanisms

The new urbanisms, such as the 20,000-unit housing structures in Hong Kong and Shanghai, provide a sharp contrast to the housing structures in Houston, which Lee describes as “like dollhouses.”

COURTESY PHOTO

“Houston houses are suburban icons with their pitched roofs and white picket fences,” Lee said. “In hyper-dense cities like Hong Kong, the houses are essentially stacked on top of one another.”

It’s not just the shape of the structure that varies between the two cultures. The variation of homebuyer expectations results in radically different forms of development.

“The North American market places a premium on secluded spaces, and individualized dwellings,” said Philip Baraldi, a graduate student in Lee’s studio. “In Hong Kong those values seem almost entirely absent. Hong Kong residents have a much higher tolerance for density, and priority is given to proximity to many shared amenities.”

The shared amenities allow more opportunities for person-to-person contact.

“People are on the sidewalks, always moving and even bumping into each other a lot,” said architecture graduate student Ryan Matta-Byrnes. “There is a lot of human interaction there and it happens 24 hours each day.”

Urban suburbs

Another of Lee’s graduate students, Jennifer Chen, said the biggest difference between the two cultures was also the biggest similarity.

“Both Houston and the new large-scale developments in Hong Kong are really suburban environments,” Chen said. “The availability of land in Houston has resulted in a horizontal sprawl, while the scarcity of land in Hong Kong has resulted in a vertical sprawl.”

The mixed-use developments in Hong Kong are made of housing units, gyms, office space, restaurants and shops. Lee said that as the need for self-sufficiency has increased, mass housing projects have become islands isolated from the surrounding urban fabric.

“These large-scale developments are generating a new breed of urbanity and what it means to live in a city,” Lee said. “Studying this is very important. It can and will affect cities all over the world.”

Toying with alternatives

On the forefront of research into these developments, Lee and her team of students have set out to find an alternative to mass housing production. The studio aimed to unhinge current building typologies, vertical proliferation (tower) and horizontal expansion (podium), and put them together in new ways. 

Instead of a repetitive cookie-cutter housing project — whether units are laid out separately in a U.S. suburb or stacked together in a Chinese development — “Toy Housing” proposed an approach of approximation that embodied looseness, inexactness and a new way of combining tower and podium typologies.

The project’s tower-plus-podium patents expand the taxonomy for mass housing developments, setting efficiency in the background and bringing new forms of urbanity to the foreground.

“Clover was very specific about the architectural strategies she wanted us to explore, but also made clear the relevance of those strategies to the urban scale,” Chen said. “I think this clarity made both our design response and the presentation of that response much stronger.”

“Toy Housing” has been well-received, as evidenced by the exhibition in the Biennale. The installation is composed of 1,000 boxes that represent toy houses.

Between the two studio classes she has worked with on “Scale vs. Size,” Lee plans to produce a book, offering her students the chance have their work published.

The studio is not a typical study-abroad opportunity nor is it a typical studio. Students work as a team on data collection while visiting China then return to Rice to work on individual design projects. Lee designed the studio that way to share the Hong Kong experience with even more architecture students.

“It’s equally important for students to go, look, learn and experience, as it is for them to come back and share with the other students,” Lee said. “It’s a way to expand the impact of the trip.”

On this trip, Lee and her students will continue to study the architecture in the high-density areas of the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze River Delta. They will return Feb. 29.