The Act of Living

To act is to resist, escape, bargain, protect, compromise; to exert agency; to do anything beyond being passive. Because being passive is no longer innocent. Passivity reproduces and reinforces preexisting order. Passivity is the drug that puts us to sleep at night only to wake up in the morning and wonder why we have been living like this – stranded in a reductive seclusion or pinned by prying eyes; bounded in an apparatus of control by which we call a house.
To live is to shatter this apparatus. Our relationship to our immediate environment is misrepresented by the inflexible, inadaptable, and hierarchy-infused interpersonal borders both external and internal of our houses. Our domestic and non-domestic spheres together construct and maintain our familiar yet illusionary sense of security, privacy, and belonging: heterogeneous individuality succumbs to dominating power under repeated emphasis on the permanence and stability of houses. To revive individuality, houses must become architectural materialization of our daily practice of agency.
This thesis is applied to Hong Kong’s council housing complex, where centralization, compartmentalization, and densification are extreme. The objective is to reinvent a housing system that prioritizes individual agency and encourages conscious decision to react; to change.