A Philosophy …
Research is an effort, a capability and a determination of searching in unknown, in darkness, and in future. It is critics to what has been done, what is being doing repetitively every day. It is a desire generated by unsatisfactory with what has been known. It stands at frontier of knowledge leading activity of practice and education. University students learn by questioning and doing research. They need nothing but a tutor who is doing research as well. This is why education and research are always together in any true university.
Open Building
Building is not a monument any more. Building is static object is a miss-consumption belong to the past. Open building is building for change.
In a rapidly changing economy as in Hong Kong, it is nearly impossible to predict accurately the characteristics of users and their requirements far in advance, under any situation. The dilemma is that on the one hand, we demand long life spans for urban and building structures, and we expect that these structures retain and even gain value over time. On the other hand, urban and building structures must accommodate change and adjustment and be designed for conversion into different functions in their life spans.
Architecture under these conditions needs to be structuring yet open, strong and resilient, lovable and able to absorb decentralized decision-making. The goal of design should become a best effort to structure the initial conditions and the dynamics necessary to stimulate a self-organized evolution. We need architecture without static and isolated buildings.
Housing in Urban Density
Hong Kong is a high dense city. When the building become higher and accommodations are elevated in the sky, streets and squares on the ground tends to loose their traditional scale, shape and activity, which New Urbanism was based upon. When high-rise buildings are compacted together, building entity such as form, space and function, which modernism architecture addresses become less significant, while the interrelations in multiple directions and levels among the buildings are intensified. When the high dense built complex are located in a fast transformation of social and economic systems and multifold culture exchanges, the static portion of the built needs to be minimum, moderated, passive, neutral and monotony. The built needs to function as platforms, structures and service channels supporting the intensive flows of users and energy, diverse and frequent changes of demands and interests. They create the conditions necessary to respond to incremental adjustments in resource availability.
The high-dense and high-rise built structure tends to obtain characters of infrastructure rather than Architecture. This is the Hong Kong situation where traditional Architecture and urban design manifestos are found handicapped, and its own manifesto has not been understood.
Sustainable Housing
Hong Kong has made a clear commitment to achieving sustainability in many areas of our economy and society that affect the environment. Housing is the biggest construction sector and it has a large impact of global environment, health quality, ecological patterns of the surroundings as well as living style.
However, Environmentalism in Hong Kong is largely a problem of pollution control. It does not necessarily lead to sustainable development, because sustainable development is a much broader concept. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The concept contains two key elements: the essential needs of population, especially the worlds poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and limit of development imposed by the state of technology and social organization and rates of (natural or managed) assimilation by the counterpart ecosystems For a developed economy, such as Hong Kong, altering over-consumptive lifestyles, reducing energy use and resource extraction, maximizing local waste recycling should become essential objectives in the city’s mission.
First, housing planning should help to create a coexisting, interactive, and self-supporting urban form integrated in mountain, water and farmland. Second, it should make a new matching point between high density and high quality. Third, the traditional mixed use and adaptable residential patterns should be carried on in the future. Forth, a set of technical and design solutions should be studied and formulated by maximizing utilization the climatic potentials, minimizing energy and resource consumption, and increasing recycling. Fifth, classical economical dominance in social behavior should be replaced by social-ecological process in which housing will play an important role.
Besides pragmatic benefits, adaptable housing has ecological significance, especially on saving energy and resource through long life span. First, it accommodates various functional demands within a limited space, so it saves energy and materials for housing construction. Second, it is adaptable to requirement changes due to lifestyle and market changes, and thus it has a long life span. Third, since the technical modification is easier than conventional tight-fit housing, the refurbishment, obsolescence, and demolition require less material, energy and labor.
JIA Beisi completed his PhD on housing flexibility with a title: Housing in Long-Term Effectiveness. His Post-doctorate research projects in Zurich include a survey of housing projects in Switzerland, the result of which was published in a book Housing Adaptability Design. Since 1996 he completed several research projects in housing adaptability and housing sustainable development based in China and Hong Kong, including:
- Housing Design Strategies for Sustainable Development in Urban Density (HK$ 70,000, 11/1996-8/1998)
- Research on Relaxation of Window Requirements for Kitchen and Bathroom in Standard Domestic Block (HK$$400,000, October 1998-January 1999)
- Ecological Living and Ecological Housing Design Guidelines for Housing in Hong Kong (HK$80,000, 1997-1999)
- Comparative study on public housing environments in Hong Kong and Singapore: Strategic proposals for housing the billions in future China’s cities (HK$ 80,000, 1998-2001)
- Comparative Study on Sustainable Housing Development in Guangzhou and Zurich (HK$ 72,000, 1999-2003)
Since the major duty at the University is teaching, Architectural education has been also a major subject of his research. He has completed a project Sensual Fundamentals of design: architectural training methodology (Principal Investigator (HK$ 70,800 (1998-2001) He has also participate a research Sustainable Housing Development in Hong Kong as a co-investigator since September 1997 (HK$433,000).