Thesis: Ruoxi (Sherry) Li

Thesis: Ruoxi (Sherry) Li

Staging Spaces: City as Theater

Theatricality as Cross-Cultural Dialogue in a Dense Urban Context

In dense urban environments, public life unfolds in fragments—in fleeting movements, overlapping paths, and moments of unspoken connection. This thesis reimagines these everyday rhythms through a theatrical lens: not by adding performance, but by revealing it. It asks how spatial design can construct scenes of participation, dissolve the line between performer and audience, and transform public space into a living stage for cultural memory, identity, and shared expression.

In a time marked by social fragmentation and digital displacement, live performance offers an embodied, collective mode of communication. Theater condenses story into space, emotion into moment. In a similar way, the city contains compressed narratives: overlapping histories, identities, and interactions moving through limited space. Rather than imposing spectacle, this project seeks to reveal the latent theatricality embedded within urban rhythms.

Ruoxi (Sherry) Li
Set in Hong Kong’s Central–Mid-Levels Escalator District, the thesis explores a vertical corridor that bridges hillside residences and the central business district. The site’s overlapping systems—escalators, streets, footbridges—offer shifting perspectives and complex pedestrian encounters. It is a space of movement, but rarely of pause. And yet, across this corridor, people are already performing—through domestic rituals, migrant gatherings, and spontaneous acts of expression that animate the street.
Ruoxi (Sherry) Li
Through concepts such as everyday theatricality, liminal space, and staged authenticity, the project reimagines architectural thresholds—frames, landings, stairs, platforms, and canopies—as tools to blur the line between performer and observer, stage and street. These elements do not dictate performance, but scaffold it—supporting interaction, reflection, and shared presence.
Ruoxi (Sherry) Li
The design unfolds across three distinct conditions along the escalator route:

- In the commercial zone, interventions slow foot traffic and frame dining, spontaneous street acts, and the construction of formal stages as forms of public performance.

- In the mid-level passage, spatial rhythms echo musical structures—where escalator movement, resting terraces, and platform crossings become choreographed encounters.

- In the upper residential zone, intimate platforms link rooftops and footbridges, cultivating casual gathering and neighborly exchange.
Ruoxi (Sherry) Li
At each site, architecture does not fix attention—but invites participation. Moments of movement, pause, and recognition become theater in themselves.

The city is already on stage—its stories unfolding in glances, rhythms, and everyday gestures. Architecture simply draws the curtain, not to begin a show, but to let us notice it.
Ruoxi (Sherry) Li

Ruoxi (Sherry) Li

Ruoxi (Sherry) Li