Can architecture help mental health? The high-rise housing designed to battle urban loneliness
- Architecture firms Kwong Von Glinow and WOHA want to turn high-rise housing in places such as Hong Kong and Singapore into vertical neighbourhoods
- The idea is to create tightly knit communities that enhance social interaction – a concept that architecture all too often ends up thwarting
A great paradox of urban life is that even – or perhaps especially – in areas of high-density living, people feel increasingly alone.
Many observers feel architecture has a key role to play in addressing the social fragmentation of such districts, where a lack of community causes despair and is at odds with the human need for connection.
“Winston Churchill once observed that we shape the buildings and then the buildings shape us,” says Tanzil Shafique, a researcher at the Melbourne School of Design who calls a lot of today’s architecture “non-design”.
“Architects and planners, albeit unwittingly, are complicit in producing an urban landscape that contributes to an unhealthy mental landscape,” she adds.
Hong Kong-born architect Lap-chi Kwong, with his American partner Alison Von Glinow, are trying to address the problem from Eastern and Western perspectives. From their Chicago-based studio Kwong Von Glinow, the pair hope their award-winning project “Tower within a Tower” will see new high-rise typologies develop in Hong Kong that help people meet their neighbours.
