Gregory Kovacs, Design Director, spoke to the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s widest circulated English-language newspaper covering the economy, business, technology and lifestyle.
Commenting on homes of the future and sustainable real estate development, Gregory said that much else is changing with regard to how people relate to their homes. “With fewer people able to get a start on the property ladder, home-ownership models need to change,” he says. “If you look at Japanese forms for example, the physical space is not very precious, as it’s only temporary – the real value is in the land.
Agreeing that flats are shrinking and the digital space increasing, Kovacs believes communal spaces are gaining ever more importance. “Right now we are working on an 85-tower residential scheme in Seoul, South Korea [slated for completion in 2023], but the focus of the scheme is not merely the flats but the bottom layer – the ground floor and the surrounding space,” Kovacs says.
“How can you accommodate tens of thousands of people while still retaining a sense of human scale? It’s about creating communities and neighbourhoods. When we turn the ground plane into a series of streets and squares, you start to create the framework for a place with a unique identity – the feeling of walking from one micro neighbourhood to another.”
Landscaping will become “even more crucial” in tying these spaces together, Kovacs adds, while the towers themselves could contribute by using different colours and design languages for the facades.
In addition to this, Gregory believes that “innovation through renovation is the most important direction in crafting cities of the future, including for residential schemes. Trying to reuse the old, before building anew, will become the key strategy for improving the quality of our future neighbourhoods.”
Benoy has been working on an increasing number of repositioning projects in Asia-Pacific – white elephant buildings that “never originally made sense, or the world has changed, and they no longer meet the requirements”. Gregory shared an example of Benoy’s recent project. a mixed-use development in the Yongchuan district of Chongqing, in mainland China, due to be completed in 2023. After languishing for a decade as “a gaping wound in the city”, the bones of the building are being resurrected as the anchor of a new city centre with a walkable streetscape.
