Tiny Footprints: Variations on the Hong Kong Pencil Tower

This pair of first-year, graduate-level studios, taught over two consecutive academic years focused on the study and design of Hong Kong’s thinnest residential building type, pencil towers. The work focused specifically on extraordinarily compact and slender buildings with single residential units on each floor. In the first stage of the course, students studied the economic, architectural and regulatory conditions that make these extreme buildings possible to build in Hong Kong. The studio worked together to conduct a survey of more than sixty slender towers in Hong Kong and document them through photography, drawing and digital modeling. An analysis of the documented towers revealed extreme ratios of vertical circulation core to livable space, unique massing strategies for reducing building volume and exploitation of building regulation loopholes to maximize rentable area. Through the research students learned valuable lessons about the close relationship between building code and building form in an ultra-dense city with extremely high land value. Efforts from the tower and code research were compiled into a studio reference guide for use during the course of the semester.

Volume Editors
Amir Ameri & Rebecca O'Neal Dagg

ISBN
978-1-944214-14-2