Location: Hong Kong, SAR China
Type : Master‘s thesis
Studio: Interiors Buildings Cities, TU Delft
Year : 2025
MAKING AN OASIS
Reconnecting mental well-being and nature In Hong Kong
Making an Oasis is a master’s thesis about transforming a Hong Kong shopping mall into a sequence of gardens. In a city where retail facilities have replaced public squares, this project reclaims one of Hong Kong’s commercial centres as a place for healing, nature, and connection. The project brings together mental health, shopping malls, and nature in the city of Hong Kong. What began as a personal reflection on well-being and architecture developed into a design that challenges the role of consumption-driven public spaces in cities. Hong Kong’s extreme density, tax-driven retail economy, and scarcity of public ground have made shopping malls the city’s de facto public squares—spaces of paradox where people face social isolation despite constant proximity.
Set in the Franki Centre—an early 1980s shopping mall—this thesis proposes four interconnected gardens that reclaim the building as a non-clinical, accessible space for mental well-being. Drawing from research and the complex urban conditions of Hong Kong, the project treats the mall not as an enclosed commercial facility, but as an exterior landscape.
In response, this thesis proposes gardens as accessible, non-institutional spaces for mental well-being—complementary to clinical care. The interventions span all levels of the mall: a botanical conservatory on the upper floors, a floral rooftop garden shaped around a circular void, a rewilded ground-level garden that reclaims the only real ground, and a suspended bridge connecting to the adjacent national park.
Each garden is informed by different historical and cultural garden typologies—from English formalism to Chinese yangjing—while circulation becomes a spatial and therapeutic act. The design subtracts rather than adds, removing slabs, walls, and hard surfaces to restore porosity and enable natural growth. Existing concrete and added steel and structures are adapted to support plant life and visitor movement, transforming confusion into clarity. Native species are prioritized to support biodiversity and seasonality. Pathways are raised to let vegetation reclaim the space below, and the act of moving through the mall becomes part of the healing process.
Through minimal interventions, local materials, and the reuse of debris, Making an Oasis reframes the architecture of consumption as a regenerative, connective landscape—reimagining the shopping mall as a garden, and the garden as a prototype of hope.
Set in the Franki Centre—an early 1980s shopping mall—this thesis proposes four interconnected gardens that reclaim the building as a non-clinical, accessible space for mental well-being. Drawing from research and the complex urban conditions of Hong Kong, the project treats the mall not as an enclosed commercial facility, but as an exterior landscape.
In response, this thesis proposes gardens as accessible, non-institutional spaces for mental well-being—complementary to clinical care. The interventions span all levels of the mall: a botanical conservatory on the upper floors, a floral rooftop garden shaped around a circular void, a rewilded ground-level garden that reclaims the only real ground, and a suspended bridge connecting to the adjacent national park.
Each garden is informed by different historical and cultural garden typologies—from English formalism to Chinese yangjing—while circulation becomes a spatial and therapeutic act. The design subtracts rather than adds, removing slabs, walls, and hard surfaces to restore porosity and enable natural growth. Existing concrete and added steel and structures are adapted to support plant life and visitor movement, transforming confusion into clarity. Native species are prioritized to support biodiversity and seasonality. Pathways are raised to let vegetation reclaim the space below, and the act of moving through the mall becomes part of the healing process.
Through minimal interventions, local materials, and the reuse of debris, Making an Oasis reframes the architecture of consumption as a regenerative, connective landscape—reimagining the shopping mall as a garden, and the garden as a prototype of hope.