If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia, podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth: a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urban planning perspective, the model can be remarkably effective—absorbing congestion, formalizing circulation, and delivering density quickly. Yet as it spreads, the typology also raises a quieter question: what does it optimize for, and what does it erode—especially at the level of the street, where urban life is meant to be negotiated rather than curated?
At its simplest, the podium–tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers. The podium typically carries the logistical and commercial weight of the development—retail, parking, loading, drop-offs, back-of-house services, and often amenity decks—while the tower stacks private programs above, whether residential, office, hotel, or mixed use. The promise is twofold: maximize urban density while maintaining a "human-scaled" street wall, and separate the messy logistics of city life from the quieter domain of living and work.
In 2012, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook offered one of the clearest documentations of a condition that many residents experience intuitively but rarely name: Hong Kong's dependence on elevated, second-storey urbanism. Through drawings and careful mapping, the book captured how the city's pedestrian networks are routinely lifted above the street—separating people from traffic, extending commercial frontage beyond ground level, and negotiating a hilly topography where "flat" circulation is often an engineered achievement. Since its publication, these systems have only grown in prominence—not only for their sheer spatial complexity, but for the way they recast public space as something continuous yet selective, connective yet curated.
This fascination, however, has always carried a parallel unease. Elevated passages can be generous and effective, offering sheltered movement and reliable connectivity. Yet they also raise persistent questions: where do these routes lead, who gets to connect, and what kinds of programs are invited—or excluded—by this "privileged" level of circulation? The second-storey city does not simply bypass vehicles; it can also bypass the street as a civic stage. Over time, it risks shifting architectural attention away from ground-level public life, relieving designers from having to negotiate pedestrian scale, frontage, and the messy reciprocity of the street. In its worst moments, the result is a landscape of podium clusters and sealed megastructures—buildings that perform connectivity at Level 2 while remaining indifferent to the neighborhood at Level 0.
Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, with a consistent focus on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place. Rather than treating materiality as a finishing language, the studio frames it as the beginning of an architectural narrative—starting from what is locally available, they look at what craft knowledge exists on the ground, and how those resources and skills situate a project within an architectural lineage. This approach foregrounds limitations and possibilities as productive forces, and positions design as an iterative process of aligning spatial intent with the realities of construction culture and vernacular intelligence.
Across their work, NEiDA's interests extend beyond form toward the socio-political and climatic contexts that shape how architecture is made and inhabited. They emphasize learning from non-authored, vernacular, and informal building practices as a way of establishing a shared grammar for intervention, and they describe an indoor–outdoor continuity not as a stylistic preference but as a response to local life and ventilation logics—where outdoor rooms can be as spatially defined and programmatically central as interior ones. Collaboration, in this framework, is not auxiliary: the studio highlights on-site exchange with craftspeople and builders as a core methodology, where projects evolve through collective intelligence and adaptive communication.
Establishing thermal comfort once demanded a far more deliberate and calibrated architectural intelligence—an interplay of orientation, massing, material behavior, ventilation potential, shading, and the ways daylight and surfaces absorb and release heat. This was not simply a matter of taste, but of necessity. When many of Hong Kong's post-war modernist buildings were constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s, forming a substantial portion of the city's public housing and broader residential stock, air-conditioning was not yet a ubiquitous, default service. Cooling, where present at all, was limited and unevenly distributed; comfort had to be negotiated through passive means, through section, façade depth, operable openings, and climatic detailing. It was only later, particularly through the 1970s and 1980s, as air-conditioning became increasingly standardized across the region, that mechanical cooling began to displace this earlier matrix of architectural decision-making.
Did air conditioning negatively affect architectural space, particularly in Hong Kong and the nearby region? The more precise claim is that widespread reliance on AC has profoundly rearranged the incentive structure of building design.
In many high-density cities across Asia, the staircase is often treated as a necessary evil. Whether in apartment buildings, private homes, or retail interiors, it is frequently hidden, tucked away, or pushed to the margins—an element to be minimized so more area can be given to "usable" space. Yet as density intensifies and square footage becomes increasingly scarce, architects and designers are forced to rethink this vertical puzzle.
The question shifts from how to conceal the staircase to how to make it work harder: can it become a productive addition to the interior—an architectural device that does more than connect levels, performing dual (or multiple) duties rather than simply consuming floor area?
In South China, there is occasionally an urban myth—especially across Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou—about choosing a home that avoids western light. Over decades, the west-facing sun has proven to be a particularly difficult condition to live with: its low angle in the afternoon, its aggressive heat gain (especially in summer), and the way it penetrates deep into interiors. With global warming and longer, hotter seasons, that much-romanticized "afternoon glow" is increasingly experienced less as romance and more as glare, heat, and fatigue. Although this wisdom circulates as a community-driven rule of thumb, it carries an undeniable architectural clarity about building orientations: avoiding western light is not only about thermal comfort, but also about avoiding the sharpest, most intrusive form of direct illumination—light that strikes at the most unforgiving angle, washing surfaces, flattening depth, and turning rooms into high-contrast fields of discomfort.
As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt sectors of the economy and reshape entire industries, institutions and individuals alike are bracing—and rapidly adapting—to the changes that machines seem to hold over our heads. Yet the more precise pressure is not simply AI altering the way people work and live, but the business models and investment logics of the companies developing these systems: the concentration of capital, the new requirements for compute, the race for compartmentalized talent, and the infrastructural footprint needed to sustain it. In the Greater Bay Area—anchored by Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong—this dynamic is especially pronounced. Government-led initiatives are actively accelerating the industry's growth, with policy and planning mechanisms beginning to translate an ostensibly intangible field into physical form: zoning updates, earmarked land, and the emergence of AI-oriented building types, from research laboratories to large-scale data centers.
In Hong Kong, where interiors and small buildings are routinely caught between two extremes—high-gloss "luxury" finishes on one end, and budget-cautious industrial roughness on the other—a third attitude has emerged through the calibration of both: a uniquely precise, relevant, and materially honest execution that is not dependent on price point. This is calibrated rawness. Calibrated rawness describes an architecture that retains the directness of matter and materiality—concrete, metal, blockwork, exposed structure, visible services—while subjecting it to rigorous control.
The "raw" is not a costume, and the "refined" is not polished; it is a discipline of precise execution, producing spaces that feel balanced and considered, yet never "made up" or overworked. Studio 1:1 demonstrates this attitude consistently across its work—and its upcoming publication, Architecture under the Radar: Three Projects in Asia (with a foreword by Nader Tehrani), offers a timely frame through which to read this ethos as more than an aesthetic, but as a repeatable architectural method.
When Hong Kong's architectural story is told, it is often reduced to a handful of icons. Many people most readily name I.M. Pei—Pritzker Prize laureate and architect of the Bank of China Tower in Central (1990), as well as global works such as the Le Grand Louvre in Paris and the Miho Museum in Shiga. Looking elsewhere, one also encounters a long lineage of British and international architects whose imprints have shaped the city's institutional skyline: from Ron Phillips' civic works—most notably the former Murray Building (1969), now The Murray Hotel, and Hong Kong City Hall (1962)—to Norman Foster's infrastructural and corporate monuments, including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Tower (1986) and Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and, more recently, Zaha Hadid Architects' The Henderson (2024).
Yet within the same period as Pei and Foster, local architects were also producing buildings of enduring significance—works that carried the legacies of Bauhaus, but translated them into a language distinctly calibrated to Hong Kong's climate, density, and civic life. These projects may not always read as commercially prominent icons, yet they often register a sharper sense of social responsibility and public agenda. Among the most important figures in this lineage is the late architect Tao Ho, whose work and public role formed a quieter—but no less foundational—strand in Hong Kong's modern architectural heritage.
Architectural heritage is not only what a building was, but what itcontinues to become: a long process of building, rebuilding, and re-occupying over time. Where opportunities allow, this continuity produces a layered condition—one in which visitors can witness, experience, and feel the gradual shifting of a building's fabric, materiality, spatial order, and patterns of use, and occasionally even participate in that transformation.
Yet many projects—particularly those driven primarily by commercial imperatives—do not choose to value, or even to recognize, this slower work of adaptive reuse and heritage continuation. Developments governed by a numbers-only logic often opt for the easier path of demolition and rebuild: maximizing plot ratio, GFA, and rentable area with the efficiency of a clean slate. And still, every now and then, an opportunity surfaces that allows us to see—and to enjoy—the city's process of architectural "heritaging" in real time.
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Traditionally, a museum visit is a calendared occasion with a clearly scripted sequence. Arrival is ceremonially marked—by grand stairs or thresholds, by ticketing and information desks, by an audio guide and a concise institutional preface about mission and history. That deliberate "special occasion" quality extends from how museums were long conceived: deliberately exceptional, tightly curated, and organized around a specific narrative arc. In this model, the museum assumes an authoritative voice—its knowledge deep, vetted, and to be respected rather than contested—while architecture and choreography reinforce a rather singular way of entering, learning, and remembering.
Having explored adaptability at the city scale, we are now zooming in on the building itself—and, crucially, on practice. How can architects, developers, and consultants embed adaptability as a measurable, mainstream outcome? This question will be on the agenda at the Adaptable Building Conference (ABC) on January 22 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where architects, engineers, policymakers, and industry leaders will explore the potential of adaptable buildings—and how to deliver them at scale.
Wonder Cabinet / AAU ANASTAS. Image Courtesy of AAU ANASTAS
Among the 2025 Aga Khan Award winners is AAU Anastas and their project, Wonder Cabinet in Palestine, whose central aim is to serve as a haven for culture and creativity and a bridge between design and production. Beyond this meaningful project, AAU Anastas—working from offices in Bethlehem, Palestine, and Paris, France—has built a broad portfolio since 2015. Notable works include Dar Al Majous, a restoration in Bethlehem that challenges the boundary between domestic and public realms; the Tulkarm Courthouse (2015), one of their first projects that redefined civicness and social gathering on a prominent corner site in Tulkarm; and The Flat Vault, a commercial intervention that adds a juxtaposed stone vault to an existing monastery shop associated with a church built in the 12th century by the Crusaders.
Among these compelling works, Wonder Cabinet likely drew the jury's attention not only for its refined execution and layered spatial complexity, but also for how it operates as a socially generative platform—dissolving the boundary between social infrastructure and architecture. Conceived to support culture, creativity, design, and production, the building aspires to host architects, designers, chefs, artisans, and sound and visual artists, among others. In no small way, it advances the spirit articulated by the 2025 judges, who characterized this cycle as a year of fostering resilience and optimism through design, by demonstrating how architecture can catalyze community and enterprise simultaneously.
The 2025 Osaka Expo has captured widespread attention—not only for its architectural ambition and spectacle, but also for breaking records and generating controversy. Its most iconic feature, a monumental timber ring designed by Sou Fujimoto, has already made headlines as a Guinness World Record-breaking wooden structure. Built on the reclaimed island of Yumeshima, the site has attracted praise and critique in equal measure. Beyond its awe-inspiring 2-kilometer circumference—parts of which extend dramatically over the water—the structure has also drawn concerns, including questions about health & safety, extreme heat, and swarms of insects that may affect the visitor experience.
This year also marks a significant anniversary: the 55th year since the 1970 Osaka Expo, held under drastically different socio-economic conditions. Comparing these two expos—both hosted in the same city—offers a rare opportunity to reflect on how the rhetoric, curatorial themes, and architectural ambitions of world expos have evolved over time. From "Progress and Harmony for Mankind" in 1970 to "Designing Future Society for Our Lives" in 2025, the shift in thematic focus reveals changing global priorities. Meanwhile, the scale and nature of architectural involvement have also transformed, from the futuristic visions of Japanese Metabolism to a more internationally dispersed group of designers concerned with sustainability, technology, and civic engagement.
In much of China, concrete remains the dominant construction material. Despite growing concerns over its environmental impact, concrete continues to align with the priorities of many developers and clients—it is fast, cost-effective, and highly durable. As a result, most building types in China still rely heavily on concrete. This reliance is further reinforced by China's position as the world's largest producer of Portland cement. A deeply entrenched supply chain, rooted in raw material manufacturing and economic infrastructure, ensures that concrete remains the default choice in the construction industry.
Yet historically, Chinese architecture was built upon a rich tradition of timber construction. The Forbidden City is a prime example: not only is it emblematic of China's architectural heritage, but it also remains one of the largest and best-preserved collections of ancient wooden structures in the world. This legacy prompts an important question: does timber construction have a meaningful future in China's contemporary building industry?
Earlier this month, news of Frank Gehry's passing prompted an outpouring of tributes to the architect behind flamboyant museums, concert halls, and sinuous residential complexes. Rather than revisit that well-charted terrain, it is worth pausing on a more contemplative work in his oeuvre: Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre in Hong Kong. Quiet, optimistic, and calibrated for everyday resilience, the building reflects multiple registers of Gehry's intent: a commitment to positivity and survival—and, more personally, an architect's own reckoning with loss and end-of-life care.
The remark reframes Maggie's Hong Kong as more than a commission; it suggests a design process shaped by grief and turned toward comfort, dignity, and the possibility of hope—an ethos that aligns closely with the organization's mission.
Where cities were once shaped by simple structures that could adapt to new uses, they are now packed with rigid dwellings—often designed with a single use in mind and fixed in both layout and lifespan. As climate deadlines tighten, communities demand more resilient, resource-conscious spaces, and work and living patterns continue to shift, this rigidity is becoming a liability. When buildings refuse to bend, they are often treated as disposable, triggering cycles of demolition, downtime, and loss. Adaptability, once considered an added convenience, is becoming an imperative—something the inaugural Adaptable Building Conference (ABC) in Rotterdam aims to put front and center.
The fragility—and temporal beauty—of neon has captivated audiences since the early 1900s. First shown commercially by French engineer Georges Claude at the 1910 Paris Motor Show, neon spread rapidly, achieving broad popularity in the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s. Mid-century America saw it everywhere: from the casinos of the Las Vegas Strip to roadside motor inns along Route 66 and the spectacle of Times Square. By the latter half of the century, however, many signs were scrapped or left to decay, and numerous municipalities restricted neon as visually garish or power-hungry—despite the technology's comparatively modest energy use. In the U.S., renewed interest in neon arguably didn't meaningfully return until the early 2000s.
In Hong Kong, by contrast, neon was embraced with unusual enthusiasm at a time when it began to lose popularity elsewhere. Even as installation slowed in recent decades—largely due to updated ordinances requiring removal of overhanging signs whose support structures failed to meet safety standards—the city's affinity for neon never fully disappeared.
