Over time, people’s sociability changes, yet the buildings and spaces they occupy do not change to accommodate their new needs. Densification has increased this problem, particularly in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, rapid densification focused solely on private spaces, leading to the proliferation of the Hong Kong tower block. Yet, the rigidity of the tower block prevented spaces from meeting people’s sociability needs as they changed over time and inhibited the emergence of organic interactions between people. Thus, the P2 Tower operated in this gap between the social affordance of the Hong Kong tower block and the people’s sociability needs. Through its research and experimentation, the P2 Tower called for the idea of an evolving architecture, one where people determine the past, present, and future of the spaces they inhabit. The P2 Tower engaged the concepts of private and public narrowly through a lens of how naturally people interact with one another to develop a system for quantifying the sociability of a space. Such a system underpinned the development of a novel computational framework which employs biomimetic principles alongside algorithmic processes. During the MSc phase, the framework deconstructed the tower into its component parts, developing them as individual parts of a whole. It employed evolutionary algorithms, abstracted principles of a bamboo stem, and an advanced material fabrication system that combined bamboo weaving techniques and robotic concrete 3D printing, enabling the P2 Tower to continuously adapt at varying scales of time and space in response to people’s shifting sentiments around sociability.

Extending beyond the tower, the M.Arch phase expanded the framework to the micro-urban and urban network scales, empowering the P2 Tower to engage and influence its context. At the micro-urban scale, a three-dimensional pedestrian simulation, driven by people’s social interactions, developed a pathway network that served as a bridge between the tower and its local context. Such a system allowed the social affordances of the P2 Tower to enhance the sociability of its local context. At the urban network scale, a resilient network of multimodal corridors connected multiple towers by considering their relationship as a temporal graph network, and a sociospatial pedestrian simulation drove the design of programmed spaces along these corridors. Coupled together, this dynamic, multi-scalar framework offered a new housing solution and urban design strategy that meets the density needs of cities while also facilitating continuous spatial changes to match the sociability demands of people over time.