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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.
AMPS
Arizona, 2019
Arizona, 2019
Critical Practice in an Age of Complecity:
An Interdisciplinary Critique of the Built Environment
Abstract
Every generation of architects, urban designers, planners and artists engaged with the built environment face a set of seemingly intractable and isolated problems particular to their time. Mid 19th Century city planners addressed questions of public health while architects engaged in a ‘battle of the styles’. Early 20th century architects argued for a ‘contemporary style’ while architects / urban designers created visions of cities in the sky. By the 1970s ecological forerunners argued for a future of sustainable living while post-modernists looked to the past for aesthetics. Today, Donald Trump promises investment in infrastructure while simultaneously relaxing environmental regulations and targets. China continues to urbanize and pollute while industrial cities in the West continue to decline and ‘go green’. Internationally, global cities of commerce can be surrounded by slums and in many cities housing is unaffordable as a place of living while it functions as a major form of capital investment. This all happens against a backdrop of the arts and cultural industries seen as economic motors, conflicting media representations of urbanization, and the emergence of new medias altering the experience and forms of reporting on life in cities. To design and understand the built environment in the middle of this complexity and contradiction requires reflection and vision. It also requires critique and multiple practices.
The publication, and the conference which it documents, were organized to create a space for critical engagement with this scenario and facilitate the cross disciplinary approach it obliges. It was organised by the research organisation AMPS, its academic journal Architecture_MPS, and the University of Arizona.
︎︎︎Read the Full Paper
Conference
An Interdisciplinary Critique of the Built Environment
Abstract
Every generation of architects, urban designers, planners and artists engaged with the built environment face a set of seemingly intractable and isolated problems particular to their time. Mid 19th Century city planners addressed questions of public health while architects engaged in a ‘battle of the styles’. Early 20th century architects argued for a ‘contemporary style’ while architects / urban designers created visions of cities in the sky. By the 1970s ecological forerunners argued for a future of sustainable living while post-modernists looked to the past for aesthetics. Today, Donald Trump promises investment in infrastructure while simultaneously relaxing environmental regulations and targets. China continues to urbanize and pollute while industrial cities in the West continue to decline and ‘go green’. Internationally, global cities of commerce can be surrounded by slums and in many cities housing is unaffordable as a place of living while it functions as a major form of capital investment. This all happens against a backdrop of the arts and cultural industries seen as economic motors, conflicting media representations of urbanization, and the emergence of new medias altering the experience and forms of reporting on life in cities. To design and understand the built environment in the middle of this complexity and contradiction requires reflection and vision. It also requires critique and multiple practices.
The publication, and the conference which it documents, were organized to create a space for critical engagement with this scenario and facilitate the cross disciplinary approach it obliges. It was organised by the research organisation AMPS, its academic journal Architecture_MPS, and the University of Arizona.
︎︎︎Read the Full Paper