CLOUDS | AN ENERGY EXCHANGE PLATFORM
RISD B.ARCH THESIS 2021 ADVISOR: PROFESSOR ANNE TATE
Do energy infrastructure and the city have to be separated? Energy infrastructure has always been considered as something that damages the quality of life; often rural areas are sacrificed for the sake of generating energy. With severe repercussions of climate change on the horizon, incorporating renewable energy in our cities should be of utmost importance. How will a city like Hong Kong, with limited land, react to global warming by re-imagining a new physical infrastructure through a canon of previous works that similarly occupy the air? A possibility is to consider the potential of an infrastructure that operates between the scale of the parcel and the scale of the city - a local, block scale system that can retroactively integrate with multiple existing buildings.
Hong Kong's Adaptive Skyline
From the 19th century to the present, Hong Kong has gone through multiple shifts and transitions in its architectural identity, mainly due to colonization, globalization, and its political climate. The change in Hong Kong’s imprint from a colony to a global city towards a Chinese future influenced the evolution of the city’s architecture.
Hong Kong's Energy Generation
As a metropolitan city with over seven million, Hong Kong does not have any natural fossil fuel resources of its own. Hong Kong relies mainly on imported oil and gas and some electricity to meet the growing energy demand.
