Towards a volumetric city

Abstract

The Ground is dead. In extremely densed urban area, the single ground do not have the luxury of space to accommodate programmes besides circulation. Other urban components such as elevators, bridges, underground passage are also circulatory oriented. The building mass have grown volumetrically and becomes thicker while the ground remains relatively thin and planar. In Hong Kong having its urban density ranking the highest in the world, its grounds have undergone a prolong struggle for appropriate reinvention. This city of commerce has favored an emergence of hyper-rational logic that permits the realization of some utopian proposals including the Corbusien plan. Such logic has also formed a "Bowl Shape" transverse-section from the mountain to the harbor, brutally revealing the differences in real-estate value across the section. The thesis takes the opportunity to reinvent a new ground - a datum - which reorganizes the commercial value distribution, reinvents generic typologies and at the same time liberates the natural ground. New cityscapes can be designed above and below the new datum which permit the architecture and architect to reclaim the "dead" ground. The Ground is alive.