Architecture competition "London Affordable Housing Challenge" honorable mention - Jeffrey Lam and Douglas Leung

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the winners of one of our Honorable mentions for the “London Affordable Housing Challenge” competition - Jeffrey Lam and Douglas Leung from Hong Kong!

Jeffrey Lam and Douglas Leung from Hong Kong

Archix Co was founded by Jeffrey Lam in June 2018 and is an architects collaborative studio based in Hong Kong. We believe in human-centric designs and flexibility in architecture that create spaces like an open platform to adapt to users’ varying and changing needs. Prior to opening the studio, Jeffrey has worked at a Hong Kong-based automotive company and acted as an in-house architect in charge of their headquarters, clubhouse and service centres.

Douglas Leung is a partner at Archix Co and a registered Architect in Hong Kong. He has 6 years of professional experience in schematic design, construction details, government submission, tendering and project coordination, ranging from institutional to residential projects during his employments at ALKF+ and Benoy.

Jeffrey and Douglas both received their Bachelor’s in Architecture from SCI-Arc in 2012.

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where company/ individuals have been involved?

We are currently working on a few residential and office remodelling projects in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Los Angeles, but our bigger interests lie in medium to large/urban scale designs. For instance, we collaborated with Things We Like on the “Walking 2018- Shanghai Urban Space Micro-Renewal Plan” competition and designed a fully user-driven park under the freeway in the middle of Shanghai. We received a 2nd Place Excellence Award for the project.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

We live in Hong Kong where designs are driven almost entirely by profitability, at least in the residential segment, and the architect’s responsibility has been reduced to a mere material picker. But we’d like to think of architecture as a tool to solve bigger issues in the society.

The soaring real estate market in the past decade has made it difficult for low and even mid-income earners to buy a 300 sq.ft. apartment and call it home. We are in pursuit of a new model or typology that tackles this problem and provides a more humane form of living for the citizens where housing prices are the least affordable on the planet.

Why do you participate in architecture vision competitions?

We participate in architecture vision competitions as part of our ongoing research for new housing typologies. These competitions give us a site and context to visualise our ideas, put them to test and help us better understand the strengths and weaknesses of each iteration.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture vision competitions?

Architecture vision competition is the ideal platform to set ourselves free from reality. It is like watching a movie when you suspend your disbelief and submerge yourself into a parallel universe where weird things are bound to happen. It is a very unique environment for our minds to get creative and ask a lot of “what if”s without the burden of responsibility, and that’s where all the fun begins.