Jamie Li

Empowering people with the tools and knowledge to construct. This project is based in Central, Hong Kong, and challenges the presets of housing architecture that often dictate undesirable living conditions under the guise of equality and efficiency. This project aims to revive the spirit of historical Hong Kong and utilizes vernacular bamboo scaffolding techniques to develop a methodology for expanding homes—a methodology that is ultimately anarchistic.

This project explores the marriage between historic structural technicalities and bamboo scaffolding, appreciating the culture behind it through a reuse and self-building lens. This is met with the challenge of improving quality of life within subdivided housing in Hong Kong by method of expanding homes, empowering tenants to be able to adjust and create modular spaces as necessary for their lives, rather than imposing programs and spaces on them that they wouldn’t necessarily need.

The result is a thesis that challenges the very idea of how housing should be approached, and whether top-down thinking is always appreciated in a high-density complex environment that is the eventual future for us all