800mm Luxury - Pencil Tower Phenomenon
“Pencil Tower� is a term that used to describe the slender tower-like apartment buildings that are found only commonly in Hong Kong and a few other high-dense Asian cities. The smallest tower consist of one apartment on each floor with usable floor area as little as 20 square meters. The 10m x 15m plot-size, set up by the British-colonial government during the 1900s, is usually extruded up into the air with some thirty stories using reinforced concrete as loadbearing structure. In almost every case the floor plan takes up the maximum allowed by the building codes for the specific plot. Therefore, pencil tower is a hyper-specific typology of building which is only economically believable under these external pressure exist in Hong Kong. While the real-estate developer exploited this 10m x 15m (W x D) plot size in Hong Kong and created the 80m-tall-pencil tower typology, it also set up a tough spatial challenge for domestic inhabitants. On one hand, the pencil tower is the smallest stand alone apartment unit in Hong Kong, on the other hand it has also been marketed as luxury apartments for middleincome group. For domestic users, how could we maximize our living environment at such 40sqm within the tower? For architects, how could we create spatial possibility within these 4m x 10m x 3m (W x D x H) volume? Simply, it is possible to further maximize square meters at a 4m x 10m x 3m (W x D x H) apartment unit?
Hiu Lan (Kian) YAM hails from Hong Kong. She received her Bachelor from the University of Hong Kong (BAAS) in 2008.
Advisor: Yung Ho Chang Readers: Filip Tejchman + Marc Tsurumaki
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