Géraldine Borio Knihy

Swiss architects and researchers Géraldine Borio and Caroline Wüthrich have been living and working in Hong Kong since 2010, when they established their architectural firm, Parallel Lab, there. Since then, they’ve been fascinated by the micro-level of urban life in Hong Kong, and it’s led to a major the pair investigated the ways the city’s residents use the narrow lanes that run behind and between the city’s high-rises, semi-public spaces that offer venues for business, social interaction, and a wide range of informal encounters. Hong Kong in Between presents the results of this exploration through a mix of black-and-white drawings, diagrams, plans, photographs, and texts that reveal the active, ever-changing life of these forgotten, in-between spaces. An enthusiastic engagement with urban life and a work of art in its own right, Hong Kong in Between reveals a city little seen and endlessly fascinating.

A survey of fifteen years of urban research by Hong Kong-based Swiss architect Géraldine Borio in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Seoul. In Looking for the Voids , Hong Kong-based Swiss architect Géraldine Borio presents findings from fifteen years of experimental urban research in Asia, proposing new ways to interpret and design urban space. Borio’s focus is on the interstitial spaces of the built environment, the back and in-between alleys, as well as the sidewalks that are in constant flux and move between the poles of inside–outside, public–private, or legal–illegal.This lavishly and attractively designed book offers a survey of the lessons Borio has learned from analyzing urban typologies in Bangkok, Hong Kong, and Seoul, and from engaging with residents and their informal appropriation of such semi-private urban spaces. The concrete design principles that Borio has derived from her fieldwork assist researchers and urban designers in their own investigations and in translating their findings into new projects for the further development of urban and metropolitan spaces.