The Gateway project induces a synergy between Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and the New Territories; simultaneously it cultivates a cohesive image for Sha Tin. Even though in the last half-century Sha Tin exploded from a few thousands inhabits to over 600,000, the city is still locked into its image of a New Town. The Gateway project views Sha Tin as a critical nexus in response to the geopolitical, economic, and cultural dynamics that surround it, and proposes a way to facilitate the city’s inevitable maturation.
The problem related to Sha Tin’s growth is manifested in three scales. At the scale of Hong Kong, the city lacks a gateway mark that corresponds to its status as an international hub. At the scale of the New Territories, Sha Tin’s architecture needs to better engage the infrastructural networks that can facilitate its role as a center to the region. Lastly, at the scale of the city itself, Sha Tin’s dispersed urban fabric lacks a strong focal point that can establish a sense of place for its population.
The Gateway project is a proposal for a city-tower. With its iconic impact, it aims to rearticulate Sha Tin’s relationship to Hong Kong, establishing the city as the third district to the Hong Kong-Kowloon bond. Integrating infrastructure as a design element in itself, and allowing for the mixing of public and private programs that relate to both Sha Tin and beyond, the Gateway firmly roots itself within the local community and opens up to the new territories at large.
The Gateway capitalizes on the importance of the transportation network through Sha Tin, and allows it to define three architectural nodes, each with distinct qualities that relate to a particular mode of transit and user group. A garden, a peninsula, and an island node house an office tower, a public tower, and a residential tower respectively. A formal strategy of exterior-interior voids is applied to the architectural articulation of the nodes and towers to define introvert and extrovert spatial organizations. Exterior voids occur in moments of private program such as office and residential programs. The interior void condition defines a cascade of public space, stitching the opposing private towers together. This juxtaposition of private vs. social/commercial space intensifies at the pinnacle of the ensemble, deteriorating any distinction between the three programs.
‘Inventing Sha Tin: Gateway’ is a means of addressing the identity and infrastructural crisis that Sha Tin currently suffers. It is a city-sized bedroom community, unable to foster an endemic identity separate from that of a the urbanistic bleed-valve for Hong Kong that it currently has. Shown above the scale, iconicity, and circular geometry of the ‘Gateway’ is intended as a visual counterpart to the Sha Tin raceway, a major landmark that occupies the water-front of the current city development. Hemmed in on both sides by steep mountain walls Sha Tin has cultivated a politically-charged legacy of learning to cope with topologically narrow tracts of buildable land, and amazing public works projects that increased this buildable footprint by depositing sediment directly into the canal to create new land upon which to build.
By projecting out over the water the Gateway answers this question of buildable land by subverting the politically-contentious act of destroying harbor space by creating new land. By doing this it is possible to construct our three nodal systems (land, peninsula, island) and cater to our three scales of city, territory, and national identity. Now the iconicity of the engineering projects that created the canal is turned vertical to create an urbanistic architectural icon.
The Gateway project speculates on the creation of engaged public space. Sha Tin facilitates overflow from Kowloon and Hong Kong in a capacity of a suburb, with little to no industry or native opportunities for employment. As a next step in its maturation process, Sha Tin must allow for these small-scale economies. Coalescing commercial/retail with office and residential programs along the entire section of the project, as well as bringing in programs related to the larger-scale economies of the new territories, births a micro-economy mentality absent in Sha Tin today. The architecture of the Gateway feeds from and projects back to the city to which it belongs.
Shown above is the ‘island node’ the only node to be totally framed by water. The exterior voids that serve as access to ferries and watercraft, when turned vertical, become the exterior voids that articulate vertical public space. This allows light and ventilation deeper into the structure of the building which in turn allows us to occupy a much deeper floor plate with residences whose light and air requirements often dictate more shallow building profiles. This constitutes the ‘extrovert’ deployment of exterior carving and outward-facing spaces that typologically characterize transport hubs and urban residences alike.
