The Lobby Lobby

Abstract

This project lobbies for the lobby, as a generous space in corporate cities capable of reversing the trend of atomization. Originating in capitalistic societies, lobbies are oddly socialistic entrances to mundane, stratified private spaces above. Formed in the gap between the ground and a hovering tower, the lobby is a distinctly modern type, conjuring notions of transparency, coexistence, continuity, and universal hospitality. These ideals are today challenged in highly privatized cities, where commodification has fragmented space: ground floors are surrendered to retail, lobbies reduced to corridors. But as private space is increasingly compressed in dense cities, and no longer offers a comfortable refuge from the world that it once did, the lobby provides a protective atmosphere as a means of escaping the cramped, superficial enclosure of the prison cell or the dysphoria of the street. A lobbyist uses specific projects to redirect a more general discourse. This project lobbies through the design of a lobby in Hong Kong, a privatized city where space is highly fragmented, a potential template of future cities. The ground floor of several office, hotel and residential towers are cleared of all shops and corridors to form a common lobby, combining circulation and space. Making a building publicly-accessible is beyond the agency of the architect, but it is possible to offer a clearing in the city. The project uses the frame to define spaces within a continuous interior. As opposed to other public interiors such as shopping malls or atriums, which enclose to negate the world, the lobby uses frames to allow foreground and background to coexist. The design of different frames with varying proportions, lighting, proximities and apertures constitutes a spectrum of spatial configurations. It is the one moment in a private development where space is designed in cubic meters rather than floor areas. The space is captured between the floor, a continuation of urban pavement; and the ceiling, the underbelly of the high-rise above. The grid emphasizes the seriality of the building and continuity through perspectival horizon, while mimicking the facade in the depth of its members. Sound-absorbing walls, ceiling heights and elevation changes create edges while maintaining an overall consistency. The postwar avantgarde, epitomized in the Madison Avenue architecture of Mies van der Rohe and SOM, employed the machine aesthetic to create spaces of exception in dialectical opposition to the city. However, the true value of the serial is its ability to absorb superficial difference and create a subtle environment, and resist the fragmentation of cities into competing spectacles.