📔 Competition Brief

As spatial practitioners, we are often presented with uncomfortable relationships, forcing us to choose sides and make decisions. We are constantly challenged to rethink how we embrace the dynamics between architecture and external forces.

Ultimately, we envisage architecture as a tool to comment, critique, dismantle and reposition a condition. As it is secretly the dark fetish of a designer to wipe the slate clean, a tabula rasa, what if you were presented with a work-in-progress new city?

Hengqin Island is that city.

Hengqin was a sleepy, rural community on the other side of a narrow river across from the city turned world-class gambling Mecca after the local gaming license was liberalized. Located in Macau’s Cotai Strip, its location, along with social and physical upcoming advancements makes it an ideal place for architectural experimentation and exploration.

The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic has dealt a serious blow to the gaming industry, prompting the Macau SAR, Guangdong and Hengqin to seek new paths for economic diversification.

Beyond the ‘2022 Development plan’, there are clearly physical and social gaps in its conception. Public infrastructures and the conveniences of life have been forgotten; cast aside in favour of Layer 01: economic diversification.

Now that the Development Plan has settled, we ask that you, the designer: intervene to plug the gaps of the life it hasn’t yet accounted for.
Layer 02 - more socially sustainable designs