Research Perspectives in Architecture and Urban Design
The 2022 PhD Symposium discusses the architecture and urban design from the lens of various research perspectives. With sustainable development goals, architectural issues reveal themselves not merely as spatial or material problems, but also as social problems. Every building is engaged in an intricate urban fabric of socioeconomic exchanges, which in turn shapes the development in building design, production, and management; in this sense, the boundary between architecture and urban issues becomes slippery. Issues such as spatial vitality, silo functioning, ageing population, public health, spatial polarisation, and urban-rural disparity have gradually become more prominent. In reaction, there has been a rising focus within the discipline on topics such as accessibility to public space, decentralised architectural practice, community building, sustainable urbanism, and digitalization. This symposium hopes to provoke discussions around such topics through research, framing architecture under the overarching urgency of socio-spatial concerns. How are buildings and cities shaping and being shaped by the rapid evolution of social dynamics? How can we read ‘sustainability’ differently under current urgencies? What does it mean by developing ‘better’ environments?
This symposium has been structured into four sessions to map the many facets of research approaches, namely, design research, urban study, history & theory, and computer-aided design. It brings together 20 doctoral students and 16 scholars from a wide range of disciplines to present their current studies. Every year, the PhD Symposium is self-organised by the Research Postgraduate Students at the School of Architecture and is open to teachers and students in relevant fields from CUHK and other educational institutions.
Session 2B: Computer-Aided Research
This session ‘Computer-aided Design’ focuses on research projects that utilise computers, both digital and analogue tools, in the creation, analysis, optimisation, and fabrication of design. It includes projects that look at mass collaboration with decentralisation technologies, heritage preservation with automated workflow, comparative analysis between physical and immersive virtual environments, the use of machine learning and data segmentation in the analysis of street space qualities, research on digital fabrication and assembly with wood, and augmenting architecture design and production with holographic instructions. The projects will be discussed together with the presenters, postgraduate students, and invited guests, Prof. Rudi Stouffs, Prof. Yulun Zhou, Prof. Lei Zhang, Prof. Marc Aurel Schnabel, and Prof. Christiane M. HERR.
