ROOM OF OSCILLATION
Spring 2023, 2024
Y1 architecture studio, HKU
Haotian Zhang
The hawker stall is the measurement of the city’s fluctuation. It responds sensitively to the flow of pedestrians, the weather conditions, or the governmental management of public spaces. It is temporal, yet its temporality is somehow permanent: the stall is ready to unfold, migrate, and be dismantled or constructed, but always present somewhere in the city. Just like the vibrant city where the stall is situated, architecture constantly transforms, sometimes oscillating between one state and another.
Zooming into its mechanism and performance, the stall is also a spatial puzzle. Its agility toward external forces results in its architectural versatility, as it intelligently deploys doors, pockets, and foldable canopies to expand and contract. The studio takes this further in the redesign of the stall and its surroundings by requiring a geometric precision of how the spaces move against each other therefore shaping each other.
The studio invited students to reimagine the hawker stalls in Central, Hong Kong, defining how the stall organizes the surroundings in two states, open and closed, as well as how the stall transforms between the two states.