Porous City – Opening the Tower
at BODW Hong Kong 2012
MVRDV and The Why Factory in collaboration with the Hong Kong Design Center (HKDC) presented ‘Porous City’ at the 10th edition of BODW, Hong Kong’s annual Business of Design Week. Addressing the evolution of the skyscraper in the Asian context, BODW will showcase 9 LEGO® towers completed this year at the TU Delft and another 101, which students of Hong Kong universities and practicing architects will produce during a workshop run by MVRDV and The Why Factory during BODW.
The results were presented as scale models made of LEGO bricks, recently exhibited at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. During BODW, researcher and lecturer Tihamér Salij with researcher Ania Molenda from The Why Factory ran the 4-day workshop ‘Porous City: Opening up the Tower’ with 20 students from Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong as well as 10 practicing architects from Hong Kong Design Institute and invited critics to develop the study further within the Asian context.
The results of this workshop, 101 LEGO towers at a scale of 1:1000 complemented the exhibition of 9 large towers, which represented the outcome of the earlier design studio ‘Eurohigh’ at Delft University of Technology, Netherlands.