Designer (Architecture and Interior), founding partner of YY Projects. Lecturer at the University of Hong Kong and the Technological and Higher Education Institute of Hong Kong. Holds a M.Arch from Harvard University and a B.A. (Arch) from UC Berkeley. Previously in Brooklyn, currently based in Hong Kong.
Daryan Knoblauch's work sits at the intersection of architecture and live cultural production, with a focus on how space is made legible through tension and atmosphere. Rather than treating temporary work as a lesser category of architecture, Knoblauch approaches installations, stages, and event architectures as full disciplinary problems—where enclosure, stability, light, and movement must be resolved with the same seriousness as any building, often under tighter constraints and faster timelines.
Across projects, a consistent thread is the productive tension between high-modern precision and an intentionally raw clarity of assembly. Membranes and lightweight systems are not deployed as surface effects, but as structural and spatial instruments—tuned to wind, load, and occupation, and calibrated to produce a sublimity that is felt as much as it is seen. Here, ephemerality is not simply a duration, but a design condition: temporality makes forces—weather, wear, performance—more visible, and demands an ethic of making that is both exacting and adaptable.
If elevated networks reveal a city that increasingly walks above the street, the podium–tower is the typology that often makes that condition feel inevitable. Across Southeast Asia, podium–tower projects have become one of the dominant languages of metropolitan growth: a system that concentrates housing, jobs, retail, and transit connections into highly legible and managed parcels. From an urban planning perspective, the model can be remarkably effective—absorbing congestion, formalizing circulation, and delivering density quickly. Yet as it spreads, the typology also raises a quieter question: what does it optimize for, and what does it erode—especially at the level of the street, where urban life is meant to be negotiated rather than curated?
At its simplest, the podium–tower is a hybrid structure consisting of a high-coverage, low-rise podium supporting one or more slender vertical towers. The podium typically carries the logistical and commercial weight of the development—retail, parking, loading, drop-offs, back-of-house services, and often amenity decks—while the tower stacks private programs above, whether residential, office, hotel, or mixed use. The promise is twofold: maximize urban density while maintaining a "human-scaled" street wall, and separate the messy logistics of city life from the quieter domain of living and work.
In 2012, Cities Without Ground: A Hong Kong Guidebook offered one of the clearest documentations of a condition that many residents experience intuitively but rarely name: Hong Kong's dependence on elevated, second-storey urbanism. Through drawings and careful mapping, the book captured how the city's pedestrian networks are routinely lifted above the street—separating people from traffic, extending commercial frontage beyond ground level, and negotiating a hilly topography where "flat" circulation is often an engineered achievement. Since its publication, these systems have only grown in prominence—not only for their sheer spatial complexity, but for the way they recast public space as something continuous yet selective, connective yet curated.
This fascination, however, has always carried a parallel unease. Elevated passages can be generous and effective, offering sheltered movement and reliable connectivity. Yet they also raise persistent questions: where do these routes lead, who gets to connect, and what kinds of programs are invited—or excluded—by this "privileged" level of circulation? The second-storey city does not simply bypass vehicles; it can also bypass the street as a civic stage. Over time, it risks shifting architectural attention away from ground-level public life, relieving designers from having to negotiate pedestrian scale, frontage, and the messy reciprocity of the street. In its worst moments, the result is a landscape of podium clusters and sealed megastructures—buildings that perform connectivity at Level 2 while remaining indifferent to the neighborhood at Level 0.
Studio NEiDA operates at the intersection of architectural practice, research, and curatorial work, with a consistent focus on how buildings emerge from the material and cultural conditions of a place. Rather than treating materiality as a finishing language, the studio frames it as the beginning of an architectural narrative—starting from what is locally available, they look at what craft knowledge exists on the ground, and how those resources and skills situate a project within an architectural lineage. This approach foregrounds limitations and possibilities as productive forces, and positions design as an iterative process of aligning spatial intent with the realities of construction culture and vernacular intelligence.
Across their work, NEiDA's interests extend beyond form toward the socio-political and climatic contexts that shape how architecture is made and inhabited. They emphasize learning from non-authored, vernacular, and informal building practices as a way of establishing a shared grammar for intervention, and they describe an indoor–outdoor continuity not as a stylistic preference but as a response to local life and ventilation logics—where outdoor rooms can be as spatially defined and programmatically central as interior ones. Collaboration, in this framework, is not auxiliary: the studio highlights on-site exchange with craftspeople and builders as a core methodology, where projects evolve through collective intelligence and adaptive communication.
Establishing thermal comfort once demanded a far more deliberate and calibrated architectural intelligence—an interplay of orientation, massing, material behavior, ventilation potential, shading, and the ways daylight and surfaces absorb and release heat. This was not simply a matter of taste, but of necessity. When many of Hong Kong's post-war modernist buildings were constructed in the late 1960s and 1970s, forming a substantial portion of the city's public housing and broader residential stock, air-conditioning was not yet a ubiquitous, default service. Cooling, where present at all, was limited and unevenly distributed; comfort had to be negotiated through passive means, through section, façade depth, operable openings, and climatic detailing. It was only later, particularly through the 1970s and 1980s, as air-conditioning became increasingly standardized across the region, that mechanical cooling began to displace this earlier matrix of architectural decision-making.
Did air conditioning negatively affect architectural space, particularly in Hong Kong and the nearby region? The more precise claim is that widespread reliance on AC has profoundly rearranged the incentive structure of building design.
In many high-density cities across Asia, the staircase is often treated as a necessary evil. Whether in apartment buildings, private homes, or retail interiors, it is frequently hidden, tucked away, or pushed to the margins—an element to be minimized so more area can be given to "usable" space. Yet as density intensifies and square footage becomes increasingly scarce, architects and designers are forced to rethink this vertical puzzle.
The question shifts from how to conceal the staircase to how to make it work harder: can it become a productive addition to the interior—an architectural device that does more than connect levels, performing dual (or multiple) duties rather than simply consuming floor area?
In South China, there is occasionally an urban myth—especially across Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou—about choosing a home that avoids western light. Over decades, the west-facing sun has proven to be a particularly difficult condition to live with: its low angle in the afternoon, its aggressive heat gain (especially in summer), and the way it penetrates deep into interiors. With global warming and longer, hotter seasons, that much-romanticized "afternoon glow" is increasingly experienced less as romance and more as glare, heat, and fatigue. Although this wisdom circulates as a community-driven rule of thumb, it carries an undeniable architectural clarity about building orientations: avoiding western light is not only about thermal comfort, but also about avoiding the sharpest, most intrusive form of direct illumination—light that strikes at the most unforgiving angle, washing surfaces, flattening depth, and turning rooms into high-contrast fields of discomfort.
Amid the rapid build-out of data centres and AI economies across the Greater Bay Area—and alongside the celebration of AI as a tool and "author," as featured in 2025 Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (Hong Kong)—a parallel question becomes unavoidable: how do the planning and construction of AI infrastructure actually begin to shape everyday life? Many of the facilities already built remain intentionally distant from daily experience. The "cloud" may be marketed as immaterial, but its architecture is profoundly physical: high-power, high-heat, service-heavy environments that are often sited in remote or low-density areas to take advantage of lower land costs and to minimize friction with nearby communities. Security and risk management further reinforce this logic. Data centres hold sensitive, privileged information—corporate assets, legal records, government and institutional data—and remoteness becomes part of their operating model, keeping the infrastructures of AI both spatially and socially out of sight.
As artificial intelligence continues to disrupt sectors of the economy and reshape entire industries, institutions and individuals alike are bracing—and rapidly adapting—to the changes that machines seem to hold over our heads. Yet the more precise pressure is not simply AI altering the way people work and live, but the business models and investment logics of the companies developing these systems: the concentration of capital, the new requirements for compute, the race for compartmentalized talent, and the infrastructural footprint needed to sustain it. In the Greater Bay Area—anchored by Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong—this dynamic is especially pronounced. Government-led initiatives are actively accelerating the industry's growth, with policy and planning mechanisms beginning to translate an ostensibly intangible field into physical form: zoning updates, earmarked land, and the emergence of AI-oriented building types, from research laboratories to large-scale data centers.
In Hong Kong, where interiors and small buildings are routinely caught between two extremes—high-gloss "luxury" finishes on one end, and budget-cautious industrial roughness on the other—a third attitude has emerged through the calibration of both: a uniquely precise, relevant, and materially honest execution that is not dependent on price point. This is calibrated rawness. Calibrated rawness describes an architecture that retains the directness of matter and materiality—concrete, metal, blockwork, exposed structure, visible services—while subjecting it to rigorous control.
The "raw" is not a costume, and the "refined" is not polished; it is a discipline of precise execution, producing spaces that feel balanced and considered, yet never "made up" or overworked. Studio 1:1 demonstrates this attitude consistently across its work—and its upcoming publication, Architecture under the Radar: Three Projects in Asia (with a foreword by Nader Tehrani), offers a timely frame through which to read this ethos as more than an aesthetic, but as a repeatable architectural method.
When Hong Kong's architectural story is told, it is often reduced to a handful of icons. Many people most readily name I.M. Pei—Pritzker Prize laureate and architect of the Bank of China Tower in Central (1990), as well as global works such as the Le Grand Louvre in Paris and the Miho Museum in Shiga. Looking elsewhere, one also encounters a long lineage of British and international architects whose imprints have shaped the city's institutional skyline: from Ron Phillips' civic works—most notably the former Murray Building (1969), now The Murray Hotel, and Hong Kong City Hall (1962)—to Norman Foster's infrastructural and corporate monuments, including the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) Tower (1986) and Hong Kong International Airport (1998), and, more recently, Zaha Hadid Architects' The Henderson (2024).
Yet within the same period as Pei and Foster, local architects were also producing buildings of enduring significance—works that carried the legacies of Bauhaus, but translated them into a language distinctly calibrated to Hong Kong's climate, density, and civic life. These projects may not always read as commercially prominent icons, yet they often register a sharper sense of social responsibility and public agenda. Among the most important figures in this lineage is the late architect Tao Ho, whose work and public role formed a quieter—but no less foundational—strand in Hong Kong's modern architectural heritage.
Architectural heritage is not only what a building was, but what itcontinues to become: a long process of building, rebuilding, and re-occupying over time. Where opportunities allow, this continuity produces a layered condition—one in which visitors can witness, experience, and feel the gradual shifting of a building's fabric, materiality, spatial order, and patterns of use, and occasionally even participate in that transformation.
Yet many projects—particularly those driven primarily by commercial imperatives—do not choose to value, or even to recognize, this slower work of adaptive reuse and heritage continuation. Developments governed by a numbers-only logic often opt for the easier path of demolition and rebuild: maximizing plot ratio, GFA, and rentable area with the efficiency of a clean slate. And still, every now and then, an opportunity surfaces that allows us to see—and to enjoy—the city's process of architectural "heritaging" in real time.
Coastal development in major cities has long been a terrain of opportunity and contention—shaped at once by the pursuit of capital (premium views, scarce land, and the promise of reclamation), by civic demands for public access and collective waterfront life, and by contemporary aspirations for sustainability and place-defining urban identity. Precisely because these agendas rarely align, extracting the full potential of waterfront sites is never straightforward.
Yet in New York City and Hong Kong, we can trace each city's ambitions—despite differing strategies, priorities, and political logics—through a set of keystone projects that anchor their coastlines. Read together, these projects reveal not only what each city chooses to value, but also what it is willing to trade off in order to build at the edge.
This article is part of our new Opinion section, a format for argument-driven essays on critical questions shaping our field.
Traditionally, a museum visit is a calendared occasion with a clearly scripted sequence. Arrival is ceremonially marked—by grand stairs or thresholds, by ticketing and information desks, by an audio guide and a concise institutional preface about mission and history. That deliberate "special occasion" quality extends from how museums were long conceived: deliberately exceptional, tightly curated, and organized around a specific narrative arc. In this model, the museum assumes an authoritative voice—its knowledge deep, vetted, and to be respected rather than contested—while architecture and choreography reinforce a rather singular way of entering, learning, and remembering.
Lu Wenyu—co-founder of Amateur Architecture Studio with Pritzker laureate Wang Shu—has shaped many of the practice's most emblematic works across China, including the Ningbo History Museum and the Xiangshan Campus of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. Often working outside the spotlight, her leadership is unmistakable in the discipline of execution and the roles she has assumed: in 2003, together with Wang Shu, she established the Architecture Department at the China Academy of Art, where she also serves as Director of the Sustainable Construction Center. Her practice and teaching form a reciprocal loop: research conducted in studios at the China Academy of Art continually folds back into construction strategies on site, while lessons learned in the field return to the classroom as material intelligence rather than abstract theory.
Across cities worldwide, architecture unfolds continuously at the scale of people and community—not only through new buildings, renovations, or monumental works. "Third spaces" are especially revealing. Consider the street-side culinary realm: how seating, serving, and lingering occupy the edge of the street often discloses a city's cultural codes and spatial habits. What forms of dining and inhabitation have emerged in response to local climate, regulation, and social custom—and how have they evolved over time?
In parts of Europe, for instance, al fresco in Italy and en terrasse in France name culturally specific ways of dining in public, drawing the meal into the urban field—attuned to weather, air, and the passive sociability of people-watching. Since COVID-19, New York City has similarly expanded outdoor dining, reflecting a community-driven desire to engage the streetscape while eating—an everyday, street-level "third place" within a dense metropolis.
Wonder Cabinet / AAU ANASTAS. Image Courtesy of AAU ANASTAS
Among the 2025 Aga Khan Award winners is AAU Anastas and their project, Wonder Cabinet in Palestine, whose central aim is to serve as a haven for culture and creativity and a bridge between design and production. Beyond this meaningful project, AAU Anastas—working from offices in Bethlehem, Palestine, and Paris, France—has built a broad portfolio since 2015. Notable works include Dar Al Majous, a restoration in Bethlehem that challenges the boundary between domestic and public realms; the Tulkarm Courthouse (2015), one of their first projects that redefined civicness and social gathering on a prominent corner site in Tulkarm; and The Flat Vault, a commercial intervention that adds a juxtaposed stone vault to an existing monastery shop associated with a church built in the 12th century by the Crusaders.
Among these compelling works, Wonder Cabinet likely drew the jury's attention not only for its refined execution and layered spatial complexity, but also for how it operates as a socially generative platform—dissolving the boundary between social infrastructure and architecture. Conceived to support culture, creativity, design, and production, the building aspires to host architects, designers, chefs, artisans, and sound and visual artists, among others. In no small way, it advances the spirit articulated by the 2025 judges, who characterized this cycle as a year of fostering resilience and optimism through design, by demonstrating how architecture can catalyze community and enterprise simultaneously.
The 2025 Osaka Expo has captured widespread attention—not only for its architectural ambition and spectacle, but also for breaking records and generating controversy. Its most iconic feature, a monumental timber ring designed by Sou Fujimoto, has already made headlines as a Guinness World Record-breaking wooden structure. Built on the reclaimed island of Yumeshima, the site has attracted praise and critique in equal measure. Beyond its awe-inspiring 2-kilometer circumference—parts of which extend dramatically over the water—the structure has also drawn concerns, including questions about health & safety, extreme heat, and swarms of insects that may affect the visitor experience.
This year also marks a significant anniversary: the 55th year since the 1970 Osaka Expo, held under drastically different socio-economic conditions. Comparing these two expos—both hosted in the same city—offers a rare opportunity to reflect on how the rhetoric, curatorial themes, and architectural ambitions of world expos have evolved over time. From "Progress and Harmony for Mankind" in 1970 to "Designing Future Society for Our Lives" in 2025, the shift in thematic focus reveals changing global priorities. Meanwhile, the scale and nature of architectural involvement have also transformed, from the futuristic visions of Japanese Metabolism to a more internationally dispersed group of designers concerned with sustainability, technology, and civic engagement.
