“We work hard, play hard. Keep partyin’ like it’s your job” - David Guetta

A joint Architectural Design & Research studio led by OMA Hong Kong and a few students from the Department of Architecture, University of Hong Kong (HKU).

In Hong Kong work and leisure are equally experienced in an extreme way. It’s always hard to define what is so extreme about Hong Kong. Extreme density, extreme promiscuity, extreme speed, extreme modernity and extreme tradition, extreme economy and extreme fun. You can find all kind of extremes. Phenomenon undetected in many global cites are very easy to be explored in Hong Kong because of its extremism.

In an extremely controlled and organized environment like Hong Kong, Leisure seems to be the ultimate good of cities inhabitants. In Hong Kong like anywhere else in the word Leisure is shrinking under the pressure of a more and more competitive production time, to a limit in which it’s hard to define what is really leisure today. A Leisure resistance can start from a moment of recognition: studying its physical space and correspondent actiities.

In the first stage, we research different age groups in Hong Kong about their most preferred leisure activities and narrow its scope down to a single leisure activity representing its demographic.

In the second stage, we observe the architectural mechanisms (organization logics, program mix, position in urban context) of their respective activities, and detail their workings in diagrams and finally A0 axonometric drawings. 

The activities of focus undergoes further distillation through the final design exercise, where we reconstruct our respective leisure program onto a common site in Kennedy Town. Depending on the needs of each activity, functional mix and density will vary - the first step of the process therefore will be the program definition.

In the final stage, the solution is obtained by combining a theme park and the dense city environment in a vertical slender pencil tower. The design through the building is in the form of a video game, where visitors play different levels as the progress through the building. It creates the mixture of surreal and reality, and to bring the fantasy closer to people. The project creates a contrast between static (office) and active (rides) body movements.