Worship: The Stratified Land Part 1 Project 2004 Anna T K Chow Chinese University of Hong Kong | China The hilly landscape icon on the Hong Kong Island provides a means of human affinity to the ground. The serrated ground introduces space for human activities while the neighbourhood stores bring in their own serrated form that harmonizes with the natural landscape, thus the definition of the ground becomes ambiguous and patchy. The project was triggered by the basis of the stepped ground. The void area surrounded by compact urban landscape climbing uphill make it an ideal setting for celebrating the ground. The stratified ground is celebrated as terraced landscape, where the earth will be experienced through movement along the sacred path to reach for the womb of the ground. The sacredness of the womb is through the act of getting into the ground and to be part of it. Anna T K Chow The scheme looked at the complexity in building a Chapel which can inhabit 150 people within an high density urban site. The strategy focused on embracing the complexity of the site conditions, the constraint of natural light, density and diagonal topography. The project's sensitivity in articulating the ground as a palimpsest, dealing with the traces of the existing similarly to an archaeological site. What is achieved is a Chapel connected by a series of pathways weaving through a sequence of carved layered sunken spaces, with the Chapel being the most sacred and deepest. As a flip from large to small details, the vertical organization of spaces is reflected in the vertical surfaces through the use of stone layered vertically to simulate strata. The student achieved a poetic and sensitive design, in contrasting the difficulties faced in such a complex site.