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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.
M1
Hong Kong, 2016
Hong Kong, 2016
Transforming Reality:
Searching for a Sense of Knowledge
“Architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality. Architecture does not have a pre-established language nor does it establish a language. It is a response to a concrete problem, a situation of transformation; only in this sense can I participate. In architecture we have already passed the phase when we thought that the unity of language would resolve everything. A pre-established language, pure, beautiful, does not interest me”.
Siza, A. “Architects don’t invent, they transform”. (AR: Issue 1416, Feb. 2015)
This year’s studio focuses on the relationship between place and education within the city. In the city things do not always work as they should; things do not fit perfectly together. Yet as conflicting forces, the worn and threadbare pieces of the city function dynamically, working in reaction to one another. Spaces of reaction, the residual conditions of the city is the agenda of this studio.
Searching for a Sense of Knowledge
“Architects don’t invent anything, they transform reality. Architecture does not have a pre-established language nor does it establish a language. It is a response to a concrete problem, a situation of transformation; only in this sense can I participate. In architecture we have already passed the phase when we thought that the unity of language would resolve everything. A pre-established language, pure, beautiful, does not interest me”.
Siza, A. “Architects don’t invent, they transform”. (AR: Issue 1416, Feb. 2015)
This year’s studio focuses on the relationship between place and education within the city. In the city things do not always work as they should; things do not fit perfectly together. Yet as conflicting forces, the worn and threadbare pieces of the city function dynamically, working in reaction to one another. Spaces of reaction, the residual conditions of the city is the agenda of this studio.
Working in opposition to the current trend to homogenize our cities, where in the name of development cities have been stripped of their social purpose, where so much energy is put into designing iconic totems, we will work empirically; from under the skin, behind the face of buildings and between the gaps of the systems that operate in the city. Through direct observations we will generate a taxonomy of residual conditions, of incomplete places, unwritten histories and un-planned spaces.
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Studio Brief
Studio Instructor
Prof. Peter W. Ferretto
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