Tolerance and Transformation
This symposium and publication led by Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee, academic from the University of Hong Kong, aims to foster a fresh dialogue on the future of architectural production centred on tolerance, which encompasses both human and material relationships and is fundamentally driven by care and openness. This symposium seeks to refocus the debate through a reassessment of our perceptions of risk as a fundamental step towards affecting the changes necessary for a sustainable future. The urgent demand to transform our industry necessitates the development of new frameworks that prioritise and facilitate experimentation and accommodate unconventional materials and approaches to construction. This symposium will bring together a diverse community of architects, designers, and makers who, through their respective practices, have discovered ways of navigating uncertainty in the architectural production today.
This symposium and publication led by Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee, academic from the University of Hong Kong, aims to foster a fresh dialogue on the future of architectural production centred on tolerance, which encompasses both human and material relationships and is fundamentally driven by care and openness. This symposium seeks to refocus the debate through a reassessment of our perceptions of risk as a fundamental step towards affecting the changes necessary for a sustainable future. The urgent demand to transform our industry necessitates the development of new frameworks that prioritise and facilitate experimentation and accommodate unconventional materials and approaches to construction. This symposium will bring together a diverse community of architects, designers, and makers who, through their respective practices, have discovered ways of navigating uncertainty in the architectural production today.
- 2023
- Grantee: Donn Holohan and Elspeth Lee
Donn Holohan is an architect based in Hong Kong and Ireland. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong and a founding partner of research and design studio Superposition. A trained cabinet maker, his research centres on building culture and the climates, tools and materials that shape it. Through the integration of emerging technology with local and vernacular knowledge, his built work seeks new modes of construction and tectonic expression which are both informed by and responsive to the places and people they serve.
Elspeth Lee is a founding partner of Superposition, Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong and a registered conservation architect (Grade III). She received her Master of Architecture from University College Dublin and the Bauhaus Universität Weimar. Her work is focused on the underlying systems and maintenance of architecture, as viewed from numerous angles: the temporal, the financial, the infrastructural and the tectonic. In support of this research interest, she was awarded a Bursary from the Irish Arts Council in 2020 to research the traditions and potentials of self-building within the context of work in practice. She was awarded the Perspective Global 40 Under 40 Award in 2021 and has been appointed as a European LINA fellow for 2023.