Next Project

A live-in factory

Part 1 Project 2009
Hoi Kwan Cheung
University of Hong Kong | China
A live-in factory

To design a factory is to design not just an enclosure of the production area but to facilitate the entire process and to address its unique quality of production.

A live-in factory is a complex organism that maxi¬mizes the productivity of the factory by accommodating the working force. It exists as a building that houses the production and accommodation functions. Yet in order to see the whole organization as a unified piece, the relationship between the production part and the live-in part has to be re-thought. They are no longer separated. So can workers’ daily routine be fused into the production process, as if they whole piece is now regarded as a machine for production? It is inevitable to depict the woven connections between the living and the working part of a worker’s life.

A kiln cast glass factory has a strong linear characteristic. Its simplicity of the recycling and producing processes were quickly identified. The servant and served part of a typical kiln cast glass factory were identified and studied. In what way should the servant and served be put together? How could the workers’ daily circulation be incorporated into the factory? Can the requirements and technologies involved in the production became another driving force for the programmatic arrangement?

Having found that one recycling line feeding into two production lines would be most appropriate if exist in linear manner, the organization of the programs within the factory were decided to arrange in strips, where supporting strips are in between the dependent ones, materializing the idea of organizing servant and served space in the scale of operating a factory. The relationship in sections of the strips was the crucial driving factor of the design. And within those supporting strips, one could find anything except the production part of the factory. Servant space becomes everything but the served space - the production line.

Here, the served space is celebrated, creating a contradiction to the norm.

Hoi Kwan Cheung

Tutor(s)

2009
• Page Hits: 17120         • Entry Date: 06 August 2009         • Last Update: 06 August 2009