The spaces and buildings that we inhabit across the city represent a complex, interconnected environmental network of water, energy, and crucially – air.

Architects seek to design the spaces that we work and live to maximize the efficiency and safety of our environmental systems – but when we look closer, a more complex reality is revealed, one informed by geometry, season, and by user inhabitation and interventions where small, individual, decisions at the human scale compound to create a large-scale impact. Our team has developed a network of tools that allow us to understand, engage, and interface with this ‘hidden’ reality to uncover and predict these unseen airflow patterns for architects and urban planners to make informed, targeted steps to improve and innovate in the built environment.

The diverse toolkit we are developing empowers us with the ability to interface with airflow paths by identifying where and how we can ‘edit’ our city via tactical interventions across buildings new and old. Proposing small changes that compound to comprehensively improve the air quality and sustainability of our spaces, we seek to improve the comfort, health, and wellbeing of inhabitants.

This interactive exhibition, assembled by our research team in collaboration with participating students, demonstrates the diverse mobilization of this toolkit. Students have choreographed their own spatial investigations via onsite sensor deployments across a diverse range of spaces, refining the breadth and resolution of our site-sensing techniques, while outlining potentials for their widespread mobilization.

Project Coordinator and Co-Principal Investigator:
Eric Schuldenfrei

Exhibition Project Team:
Jay Jordan and Sze Chun Liu

Student Team:
Jabez Owen Cheng, Chin Tung Chim, Eamon Sun, Pak Yan Sze, Yian Jiao, Jiayi Sun, Minke Tang, Xiangyi Wang, Lok Fan Wong

The work described in this exhibition was fully supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (HKU C7105-21G).

Know more about: HKU ARCHITECTURE GALLERY “Urban Air Cartography: Revealing the Hidden Airflow Paths That Connect Our Spaces and Cities”
Website: www.arch.hku.hk/event_/urban-air-cartography
Facebook: www.facebook.com/archhku
Instagram: @hkuarchitecture