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Condition_Lab is a Design Research Laboratory based within the School of Architecture at CUHK. Established in 2018, our primary focus is to improve people’s lives through design.
The Lab’s research resolves around designing socially responsible architectural prototypes. By working hand-in-hand with local partners on real sites, our aim is to develop projects that foster a better sense of community. The prototype acts as a vessel to generate new knowledge about how people inhabit their environment.
Our philosophy revolves around the paradox embedded into the word “condition”, as a noun it refers to a context, a circumstance, or a situation, while as a verb it implies change - to condition something based on an original state.
Condition_Lab © 2021 School of Architecture,
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
All Projects
︎︎︎Research
︎︎︎Teaching
︎︎︎Design
News
People
Contact
Outreach
Facebook
Instagram
Issuu
Wechat
Condition_Lab is a Design Research Laboratory based within the School of Architecture at CUHK. Established in 2018, our primary focus is to improve people’s lives through design.
The Lab’s research resolves around designing socially responsible architectural prototypes. By working hand-in-hand with local partners on real sites, our aim is to develop projects that foster a better sense of community. The prototype acts as a vessel to generate new knowledge about how people inhabit their environment.
AA Inter 5
London, 2008
London, 2008
A Sorting Hotel
There is a new typology of building which is seldom explored in the current architectural debate: massive , purpose-specific infrastructural buildings that belong to a bygone political era and have now become obsolete.
Rather than purpose yet another mied-use development (the stock response to this problem of modrn technology), the unit's agenda was to investigate different ways of appropriating this forgotten building type and proposing single intervention - a hotel - following a critical reassessment of the site.
Each students' hotel brief was the result of an abstract exploration theough the medium of a film trailer - a trailer for a hotel that doesn't exist. This exercise took inspiration from Francesco Vezzoli's parody trailer, 'Caligula', and culminated in a two-minute trailer integrating the work of all 14 students.
After a delicious and intimidating unit trip to Las Vegas, the students appied their abstracts to the given site: the former Royal Mail sorting office in New Oxford Street, London.
Through plastic and contextual design processes the students started to translat their concepts into architectural narratives in the form of large-scale models.
The result of this year's work is an assemblage proposal, to be contrasted with the Madrid Puerta America Hotel typology, where students' proposals are the results of their intentions clashing with both the existing context and other students' designs.
For this reason no single projects is selected here. Instead, each student's hotel is represented with her/his first image and final design, leaving open the fundamental ontological question of what a contemporary is.
Unit Staff
There is a new typology of building which is seldom explored in the current architectural debate: massive , purpose-specific infrastructural buildings that belong to a bygone political era and have now become obsolete.
Rather than purpose yet another mied-use development (the stock response to this problem of modrn technology), the unit's agenda was to investigate different ways of appropriating this forgotten building type and proposing single intervention - a hotel - following a critical reassessment of the site.
Each students' hotel brief was the result of an abstract exploration theough the medium of a film trailer - a trailer for a hotel that doesn't exist. This exercise took inspiration from Francesco Vezzoli's parody trailer, 'Caligula', and culminated in a two-minute trailer integrating the work of all 14 students.
After a delicious and intimidating unit trip to Las Vegas, the students appied their abstracts to the given site: the former Royal Mail sorting office in New Oxford Street, London.
Through plastic and contextual design processes the students started to translat their concepts into architectural narratives in the form of large-scale models.
The result of this year's work is an assemblage proposal, to be contrasted with the Madrid Puerta America Hotel typology, where students' proposals are the results of their intentions clashing with both the existing context and other students' designs.
For this reason no single projects is selected here. Instead, each student's hotel is represented with her/his first image and final design, leaving open the fundamental ontological question of what a contemporary is.
Unit Staff
Peter W. Ferretto
Stefano Rabolli Pansera
Students
Anna Anderich
Alina
Beissenova
Umberto Bellardi Ricci
Tommaso Davi
Tommy Gunawan
Fredrik Hellberg
Fusako Ishikawa
Camille Lacadee
Alexander Laing
Miscia Leibovich
Aram Mooradian
Sayaka Namba
Yuko Odaira
Jaime Sol Robles
Thanks
Joel Newman
Samuel Ruckstuhl
Jan Jongert
Christian Zollner
Goswin Schwendinger
Michael Weinstock
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