What Happens When Architects Think Like Manufacturers?

It's a question worth sitting with — because when it does happen, the results are worth paying attention to.

Tai Kwun in Hong Kong is a good place to start. The former Central Police Station, Central Magistracy and Victoria Prison compound — a walled collection of heritage buildings at the heart of Hong Kong Island — was transformed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron into a cultural centre for arts and heritage. It opened in 2018 and is now one of Hong Kong's most significant civic spaces.

The restoration of the sixteen historic buildings is quietly accomplished. But it's the two new buildings Herzog & de Meuron added to the site that are worth examining through a manufacturing lens.

Both structures are clad in a cast aluminium rain screen made up of thousands of identical modular units — industrially cast, precisely engineered, and mass manufactured. At first glance they read as a bold architectural gesture. Look more carefully and you start to see something more interesting.

Each unit is doing multiple jobs simultaneously. The geometry controls sun shading. It manages rain protection in Hong Kong's subtropical climate. It reduces glare and reflectivity during the day. At night it partially screens interior light, allowing the life of the buildings within to show through while limiting light pollution. The shape and dimensions of the modules were drawn directly from the granite blocks in the historic prison walls surrounding the site — connecting new to old through material logic rather than imitation.

One manufactured unit. Multiple resolved functions. Contextually grounded. Produced at scale.

This is what design for manufacturing looks like when it's applied with architectural ambition. It's not a compromise — it's a creative discipline. The constraints of mass production didn't limit what was possible here. They shaped it, and the result is richer for it.

The gap between architecture and manufacturing thinking is still surprisingly wide. Architects are trained to design. Industrial designers are trained to design things that can be made — repeatedly, consistently, and economically. In Australia, that gap is particularly evident in civil and public realm projects, where urban assets are often designed without the manufacturing intelligence that would make them more resolved, more efficient, and more meaningful to the people who use them. Those two bodies of knowledge don't overlap as much as they should, and the industry is only beginning to recognise what's possible when they do.

At Paranormal Design, a Sydney-based industrial design consultancy, we work at exactly that intersection. We bring end to end hardware product development and mass manufacturing experience to the public realm — to the shelters, drinking fountains, street furniture and urban assets that populate the spaces architects and landscape architects create across Australia. The goal is always the same: resolve the brief fully, design for manufacturing, and find the creative opportunity that lives inside that constraint.

Tai Kwun is a reminder that the opportunity is real. And largely untapped.