WEAVING THE COMPLEX CITY

摘要

Working in the fast-moving economic and urban milieu of the Asian century, SPARK has become highly skilled in exploring and implementing strategies that combine technical prowess with imagination, memory and meaning One welcome consequence of Asian population, urban and economic growth is to challenge the cosy conventions of standard architectural thinking. Obsessing over elegant details is pointless if the facade is a blank box. So is assuming that social projects are inevitably superior to commercial ones if they are only provided within profit-led development. And though a powerful homogenising spell flows from tsunamis of commercial pressures cast, the eddies within them are invitations for architects to resist, not by retreating into the comfort zone of 'tectonics', but by scouring the depth of their discipline for strategies that might mix technical skill with imagination, memory and meaning to augment desire. This is the context in which SPAKK has emerged and grown to a staff of 80 in offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore and London.