Fill The Gap Skyscrapers

By:  | April - 20 - 2020

Honorable Mention
2020 Skyscraper Competition

Zhong Chen, Wenheng Wang, Gengshen Zhai, Naiqiang Yu, Peng Zeng
China

Background
Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated regions in the world. The per capita living area in Hong Kong is only 15 – 20 square kilometers. Many people find it difficult to live here, but most people in Hong Kong are reluctant to leave Hong Kong. Housing prices are also not cheap in Hong Kong, the price of residential buildings in Hong Kong is higher than that in Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, New York, Singapore, and other cities, ranking second in the world after Monaco.

Under the daily impression of how prosperous and luxurious Hong Kong is, there is a group of people living in an environment that is impossible to imagine. “Coffin room” is one of them. The coffin room is divided up and down on the basis of the original plate room. It is converted into six small rooms, each of which is about 1.5 square meters. Some people can’t even stretch their legs when lying down. Another famous example is “cage house”, which is a sleeping place surrounded by barbed wire. It’s like a cage for raising livestock.  These people living in the “cage” are called “cage people” vividly.

In order to improve the living environment and expand land use in Hong Kong, people seem to have racked their brains. A designer in Hong Kong has designed a kind of “snail house” with a sewer pipe as the shell. It covers an area of 9 square meters and is about 2.1 meters high. It is already a quite large house in Hong Kong where land is extremely valuable. In addition, the Hong Kong government has proposed the “Lantau Tomorrow” plan on land supply. It plans to build an artificial island of 1700 hectares in Lantau and provide up to 400000 residential units. It is expected that the first batch of residents will be realized in 2032.

Possibility of Gap Space
Besides these solutions above, in order to increase land use and improve people’s quality of life, there seems to be another possibility in Hong Kong – the use of gap space between residential buildings. Using the gap space can expand a lot of space, and at the same time, it can solve the above problems perfectly without affecting the normal social order.

Supporting Structure and Living Box
The supporting structure in the gap adopts the folding steel frame structure, which has the advantages of high strength, lightweight, simple fabrication and fast construction period. It is designed as the folding structural unit for mass transportation and rapid installation and can be flexibly adjusted according to the size of the residential building and the distance between buildings. After the steel structure frame is installed, the residential box is put into the frame according to the user’s needs. Because different users have different social statuses, economic conditions, family members and other factors, we classify the boxes, which users can choose their own combination according to their needs.

Future Prospects
It seems that only using the gap space is not enough. On the basis of using the gap space above, we can expand the space in other directions according to the actual needs of different occasions, such as making some additions along the external facade, breaking down the sheer walls of some floors of the residential building to form a huge connected air platform, and extend the gap space to the roof, connect the roof to form the sky garden, etc.

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