Home
Brian Hwui Zhi Cheng
Diploma 14
The Continuous Strip in a Discontinuous City The project empowers the individual worker by transforming the corridor into an intense space for work and interaction. As a whole it acts as a currency of exchange, facilitating interaction between different facets of the city, yet entrapping and consuming it at the very same time.
Spaces to live, produce and consume are all lined up end-to-end as a band while a second continuous band, a corridor, becomes the main space for the sharing of intellect, as it is only in such a shared realm that anyone is able to interact freely as an individual without prejudice from a higher authority.The rooms are the private domain of the individual, the place where he finds refuge from the city … … while the corridor becomes a true space of production.Overall, the binary strip creates an intense environment that empowers the post-Fordist individual, as Hannah Arendt points out, it is only where men live so close together that the potentialities of action are always present, can power remain with them.This intention is also manifest in the details of the scheme. The sliding doors are hung off the walls, removing the need for any tracks on the floor that distinguishes corridor and room, while plug sockets are provided in equal number on both sides of the wall to create a conducive environment to live and work.As a whole the strips act as a currency of exchange, facilitating interaction between the different facets of the city as it exists side by side with the natural landscape, urban fabric and transportation network as a new city infrastructure. Yet at only 8-metres high, the intervention is deliberately quiet with no intention of being another monument in a city of exceptions, where one distraction is overcome with another that is bigger, bolder, louder. What is crucial however, is the hope that it is through this silent architectural manifestation that we appreciate in larger context, the sardonic condition where we today have become completely consumed by the very labour apparatuses that empower us.In its most perverse form, the strips extend and proliferate across the city in the same way that labour today, in being so abstract, has become so ubiquitous and encompassing that it is impossible to escape it.Behind the illusion of greater flexibility and autonomy that we enjoy today, the truth is that all aspects of our human faculties are being exploited to create value in such a way that the celebration of the individual ultimately leads to his entrapment.