Ambrose Yiu

CIVIC SCHOOL
A Project of Political Participation for Hong Kong

Hong Kong is undergoing a profound political crisis. People have made clear their distrust of the police and the government system at large. The uprising demands the rethinking of people’s participation to public life and political decisions.

Far from retreating in simplifying solutions or escaping in utopian speculations, the project accepts such challenges by investigating the relationship between power, space and institutions through architectural means. Acknowledging that the protest is a collective act of re-appropriation of space against the ruling power and that architecture tends to institutionalise the energy of the revolt into codified norms and behaviours, can we design architecture as an instrument to continuously challenge and renew the exercise of popular sovereignty? Instead of imposing or celebrating power, can built-form be a device to engender debate?

In light of the discussion proposed by ADS10 on the School as the paradigm of knowledge production and exchange, the project assumes political participation as the ultimate form of “building common knowledge” and architecture as its necessary frame. Indeed, debating ideas, organising space and acting in the public sphere we exercise those very faculties that make us human, our common ability to produce by thinking, relating and making. However these processes need a form and an organisation of space to happen and become collectively recognisable, shared and potentially challenged.

The project proposes a Civic School for Hong Kong, an infrastructure and a stage for popular participation, a platform for the continuous renewal of the social contract. The design assumes the paradigmatic form of a cover, made of metal portal frames and transparent roofing. The cover identifies a portion of the urban ground where collective gathering can happen in various forms and scales: its transparency speaks of an open and unpredictable relationship with the city, while its presence provides a symbolic and material stage for political action. 

The Civic School replaces the existing typology of the Municipal Complex, introverted and imposing public buildings that were conceived less to foster civic awareness than to impose the governing power. The project takes the district of Sham Shui Po as a test ground for the idea, which however is meant to reproduce across the whole territory, constituting a civic infrastructure for democratic participation. The infrastructural and performative character of the project reflects the idea of an open-ended relationship between form and life, city and citizenship, where architectural projects can only frame but never predict the potential outcome.

MA Architecture
ADS10: Savage Architecture – Building Common Knowledge
Tutors: Gianfranco Bombaci, Matteo Costanzo, Francesca Romana Dell'Aglio & Davide Sacconi