Scarlett (Sze Chai) Hau

Scarlett (Sze Chai) Hau is a Master of Architecture candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Hong Kong, with an exchange semester at the University of California, Berkeley. She graduated with First Class Honours, with her final studio project nominated for the RIBA President’s Bronze Medal.
 

"Giving dreams an address."

Scarlett is drawn to immersive environments, cultural spaces, and amusement parks, guided by a belief that architecture can be a vessel for joy. Her interests began with a fascination for fantasy and utopian worlds, which gradually evolved into an architectural inquiry. Her time observing Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen reframed her understanding of amusement parks—not as places of escape from reality, but as environments where delight quietly inhabits the everyday. The happiest people, she realized, live as if the world itself were a theme park.

This perspective leads her to explore how the sensibilities of cultural and amusement spaces—play, wonder, memory, and participation—might inform everyday life through the lens of the built environment. Through her work, Scarlett imagines architecture as a framework for communities where imagination is embedded into daily routines, where possibility is spatially choreographed, and where dreams are not abstract ideals but lived realities. She hopes to give every dream an address in the physical world.