By Irina Vinnitskaya(click here for original article)
Courtesy of YS Groundwork
We have already introduced you to the Night Club Hotel: Bubble X (2nd place) and Elevated Night Club (3rd place) winning entries for the Night Club Hotel in Hong Kong by vGH Company and Urbanplunger respectfully. We now unveil the first place proposal, submitted by Hong Kong based architecture firm YS Groundwork. Extremely Negative is concerned with distancing itself from the typical design solutions that produce mega-structures and commercial towers. Instead, the team decided to invert the structure creating a void below grade that can be occupied at multiple levels with programs such as an open air disco, a hostel and a monastery.
Diagram 01
The design concept and inspiration for this project comes from a desire to push against the “incubators of loneliness” that “tiny dwellings” have produced. The solution is to create a night club that accentuates the spiritual experience with the hopes that it can be the cure for the isolation produced by high rise apartment buildings and highly commercialized urban centers. The anti-skyscraper brings community in a most unlikely place: into the night club. The layers of the “building” – or void – are stacked. The uppermost layer, closest to the surface and most easily accessible is the open air disco, which becomes part of the sidewalk of the street and creates an inviting and welcoming space for passersby. This makes participation more likely.
Section 01
The next layer down is the hostel – also inherently a community environment – which brings travelers and visitors to the heart of activity. Below this, at -200 meters is the monastery – a spiritual and serene space away from the bustle of the city and the noise of the night club. It is programmed like the foundation from which the hostel and night club springs, which is an unlikely combination but brings a spiritual meaning to the activity at the other levels. All three layers of the structure provide a sense of community and digging lower into the earth brings visitors to a more serene and spiritual place from where they arrived.
Architects: YS GroundworkLocation: Hong Kong, ChinaCompetition date: 2011Competition scale: International competitionPlace in the competition: 1st prizeDesign team: Manfred Yuen, Chris Zhang, Dennis Lui, Kevin So, Vincci Mak, Casey Wang, Violette Chen and Tracy Qian
Site 01
YS Groundwork’s Project Description:
Extreme pleasure lives from constraints and dies from freedom.
Our design is an attempt to address the series of questions that were provoked by the brief: does Mong Kok, officially the most densely polluted red-light district on the planet, needed a mega-adult entertainment centre? If we are to accentuate the extreme and acute entertainment that this density offer, how would this mega structure attribute to the city, or the world?
Does extreme pleasure leads to a Tower of Babel?
Loneness are the greatest vehicles for the quest for adult entertainments; the tiny dwellings that our density had generated are in no-doubt incubators for loneness. Perhaps spiritual uplift is the only and final ascendance for pleasure and the cure for loneness?
Would an inverted Mong Kok; the opposite of what Mong Kok is representing: offered all of the followings: tranquility, love, peace? Would spiritual ascendance be the ultimate goal for extreme pleasure?