Studio HK: Landscape Peripheries

Related Staff : Ivan Valin, Michael Kokora, Susanne Trumpf

This year’s second core MLA studio engaged the dynamic natural systems and contested territories along the coastal edge of Hong Kong Island. The studio’s origin was the Hong Kong Coastal Trail, a working proposal for restoring pedestrian and recreational trails to create a continuous path around the island. Students worked with this initiative as a catalyst for additional strategies and interventions that amplified the connective, regenerative, community-focused ambitions of the existing plans. Students worked through a series of exercises framed at different scales to develop their proposals. The fist exercise examined the variety of landscape systems and communities that are crossed by the proposed trail right of way. After detailed spatial and material documentations, students isolated a user and designed an interface that augmented, adapted, or modified that user’s exchanges with the site. In a second exercise, students focused on 6km section of the trail and used maps and sectional diagrams to illustrate the network of relationships, decisions, and agencies that underlay the coastal trail’s development and structure its potential within the larger urban and ecological territory. The final proposals included landscape-led interventions augmenting the original trail planning to conserve critical habitat or improve water retention; expand the possibilities for green or multi-functional civil infrastructure; or to support local communities through access, mobility, and revitalization projects.