RFP Magazine

The Hong Kong Design Institute Building has won its architect several awards but its concept is a simple as a blank sheet of paper.

Four thousand students will decend on Tsuen Wan in Hong kong as the new design centre.  Their centre for learning is an architecturally award winning building, the commission of which was also the subject of a design competition of 162 teams from 23 countries. The winning design is based around the concept of a blank piece of paper, held aloft on four fingers of a hand.  

Rather than the usual approach of creating a poduim sunk beneath high-rise towers, in the HKDI the image is inverted with a ‘floating poduim’ sitting several stories up, creating an umbrella of the space beneath for exhibitions, events and, importantly for Hong Kong, public space. The building is not an obstacle, instead it is a natural gathereing point and thoroughfare for people, ideas and the breeze.

Architect Thomas Coldefy of Coldefy and Associates, a firm started by Thomas’  father in 1984, “has a passion to help introduce low carbon living to Asia Pacific”. As such despite the brief not mentioning any environmental requirements, he was keen to develop his programme to be as green as possible.  He belives that part of an architect’s duty is to educate, inform and influence clients, particularly in low-tech green solutions.  

Coldefy, thingks that the low tech slutions are often overlooked because many of the initial ‘green buildings’ were commercial endevours with big budgets. In these cases, the fundamental building design stayed the same, but expensive high-tech features were added to mitigate environmental impact. For example, he states, the architect deigns a fully glazed building, requiring increased energy consumption for air-conditioning. So the ‘green’ solution was to add double glazing, rather than assessing the need for a fully glazed building on that site. As such Coldefy is not interested in chasing the traditional building certifications such as LEED or BREAM, but searches instead for solutions adapted to the site and purpose.

Working green design
While HKID’s classic materials of glass steel and concrete are hardly green per se, the periferal steel trellis structural system has reduced the number of columns and walls required thus reducing the usage of construction materials all the while channelling natural breezes into the interior, to regulate temperature. Underneath, Hong Kong’s longest escalator of 60 m “tethers” the podium to the ground and shuttles students into the sky of ideas in the podium above.

While accepting that cultural and public building commissions give greater opportunity to “express creatively”, at the Coldefy studio, they teach as part of the comapny culture an ethos of design and space that is both sustainable and uniquely creative whatever the remit.  Setting up a permanent practice in Hong Kong the group want to bring this approach to further commissions in Asia. Even if it means sometimes turning down work.”If you want 300 “Venetian style” villas”, says Coldefy, “We cant help you”.

“What makes buildings exciting is a change of scale and space” he says. However even in cases where teh brief is not as expansive he tries to bring his own ideas. He describes the design institute as a “quite fantastic client” as the changes and restrictions on design were of a moderate and practical nature. The purpose of education is to “elevate the mind” says Coldefy balancing a blank sheet of paper on the tips of his fingers and raising it up. And with the purity of vision that the team were able to achieve, the architecture, he believes, assists in that.