Design Trust Grant Project Spotlight

Design Trust is pleased to share grant projects highlights in the summer. From Pang Jai architectural documentation group's "Thirty-Three Pang Jai" zine series and exhibition, to ‘Dusts Chambers’ by Adam Hudec recently exhibited at Biennial of Design Ljubljana and many more by Design Trust grant recipients.

Design Trust Seed Grant recipients Pang Jai architectural documentation group documents thirty three hawker stalls in a transitional Fabric Bazaar in Sham Shui Po, a cluster of self-maintained stalls of informal spatial qualities representing a unique part of Hong Kong’s fabric industry. This architectural documentation project uses measured drawings and illustrations to reveal vibrant perspectives of Pang Jai, emphasizing the relationship between spatial formation and the built environment under Design Trust supported grant research “Facing Demolition: a documentation of Pang Jai Fabric Bazaar”.

"Thirty-Three Pang Jai" zine series is comprised of De-composition, The Operation, Lives and community, and Nature; four aspects to describe both the material, immaterial and recorded interviews of the site, and it’s cloth fabric vendors. The exhibition 《樹民布衣》原生的深水埗棚仔  exhibited at Form Society in Sham Shui Po as an extension of the "Thirty-Three Pang Jai" zine series, allowing the public to experience the lives in Pang Jai from the observation by the documentation group, . Using sketches, paintings and models to deconstruct the hidden qualities of Pang Jai built by cloth vendors.

Images courtesy of Pang Jai architectural documentation group

Exhibition photos by Design Trust

 “Interstitial Hong Kong” by Design Trust Seed Grant recipient, Xiaoxuan Lu, Ivan Valin and Susanne Trumpf, documents Sitting-out Areas (SOAs) as a unique public space typology occupying the interstices of Hong Kong’s physical urban fabric. Through illustrated surveys, field photography, documentation of design processes, and advocacy, the research team unveils their exceptional opportunities to be woven into the seams of the urban fabric itself, finding expression in the gaps, the edges, the overlaps, and the redundancies falling out of the process of urban development.

“Enmeshed in Hong Kong’s densely woven urban fabric, wedged between its towering mixed-use complexes and perched along its steep hillsides, sits a network of more than 500 miniature public parks comprising the smallest unit of the city’s public open space network. This book presents a series of critical essays revealing the city’s Sitting-out Areas in relation to Hong Kong’s planning histories and shifting terrains”. Ultimately, the book argues that we can understand the high-density city not only through its buildings, but through the character and potency of its interstitial landscapes. 

Images courtesy of Xiaoxuan Lu, Ivan Valin and Susanne Trumpf

Design Trust Seed Grant project “b:inural” by Thomas Tsang, Architect & academic with composer, multi-instrumentalist, and performance artist Du Yun, on a 2017 -2018 collaborative project and research oriented performance and architectural installation, creating a dialogue between two distinct disciplines but migrating practice in dialects, music, opera, languages and architecture by engaging professional and amateur Cantonese opera singers with contemporary practice. With its launch of “Sounding Architecture in Concert” in Loke Yew Hall and printed matter “Sounding Architecture Manifest” that was distributed at the UABB Shenzhen and the 16th International Architectural Exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2018, the team’s explorations continues in 2021 in the upcoming exhibition “Soundtecture: Density as Intensity”. 

This new exhibition documents a series of works that explore the collaborative potential between the sonic arts and architectural installation, combining musical and architectural expertise to deepen our understanding of the effects of Hong Kong’s extreme built environment on its sound ecology.

Team: Thomas Tsang (Associate Professor of Architecture, HKU); Giorgio Biancorosso (Director, Society of Fellow in the Humanities and Professor of Music, HKU); Deborah Waugh (Assistant Lecturer of Music, HKU); Nanamu Hamamoto (Artist).

Images courtesy of Thomas Tsang

“Dusts Chambers” by Adam Hudec probes us to reflect on the question ‘How do airborne dusts affect our lives?’ This question led to the multidisciplinary research endeavor focused on invisible air-conditions of territory using a variety of expressions to represent the research outcome. By investigating the forms of human engagements with the invisible atmospheric substances, grantee team aims to re-claim, re-construct and share a common knowledge about changing nature and human impact upon the environment. The team also developed a Dusts Catcher Kit which is a simple, foldable and fully recyclable tool for collecting and materialising airborne dusts.

This project has been presented at Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture and the recent Biennial of Design Ljubljana, showcasing an investigative approach relating to the human and non-human world surrounding us.

Images courtesy of Adam Hudec