New Asia College Student Dormitory

The interest in this project lies in designing the community within the student dormitory. The project site is in Shatin on a bucolic hillside on a university campus. Making a residential community for 300 students, the program includes 150 dormitory rooms, multipurpose hall, game room, study room, among other amenities. Our design intention is to maintain the sense of intimacy and close relationship between the students - we want the project to allow for opportunities where students can meet and encounter, to learn from each other through the way the architecture is designed. We create a series of small blocks for the students that spread throughout the site - by breaking down the hostel block into small volumes, the project reacts to the human scale and the natural setting of the site. ​ The concept of the transparent multipurpose hall is a collegiate “courtyard” where it embodies a shared platform to bring the different hostel blocks together, one that follows closely to the traditions of collegiate life in the Anglo-American framework that is Harvard, Yale, Oxford and Cambridge. It is essential that it is a space that is welcoming, inviting, transparent physically and conceptually to promote openness in education, both socially and intellectually.