- Domestic Spatial Ecology - Composition/Architecture
Austin is a fast-growing metropole - exactly because Austin keeps on being weird. Austin’s growth is driven by the sheer quantity of its unique, peculiar, and distinct places. Austin exists concurrently, not only through being capital, being the site of renowned institutions, corporations, museums, or master-plan but in its plurality: the simultaneity of all its different situations, moments, and ways of negotiating spaces. More than polycentric, Austin is pluralistic. More unintended and much more bottom-up, the city’s characteristics derive from a cooperative and plural production of space. Today, not by coincidence, Austin is attractive for the tech & start-up scene. Mirroring digital media into the physical realm, here too, residents do not consume but reside in the city.
- Started from Human Scale （Prototype）
This studio is the first vertical studio in UT-Austin. the aim of this studio is to explore the logical ordering system of an experimental and residential public space which we called 'BIG BOX' to research deeply on materiality, privacy, and borders. Through researching the relationship between social distance and human scale, I designed a single unit prototype and clarified the different borders in 3 categories, and using this logic in how to develop the circulation and the whole system of the big box.
When considering the circulation and system of this two-floor big box, I found after connecting the different kinds of edges of the unit, it can form a new communication space, which is highlighted as the yellow area and gradient red points on the right diagram. I defined them as ' HOT SPOTS', and those yellow areas can be recognized as places for different activities but the quality of them is for social. (STARBUCKS, RESTAURANT, LIBRARIES)
- Domestic Living Units
By creating unit aggregations that branch off in multiple directions, u-shaped areas for courtyards and community spaces were produced. Within the Big Box structure, each one of the three floors has pods of smaller communities within the larger whole. As the floors were stacked they were offset and floor plates cut away. This allowed more vertical height and the illusion of larger spaces. Walkways between the pods connect to other floor areas and to the entrances/ exits.
- The Form Research - Material & Corner
The Form Research is based on the holy cross church in Switzerland by Walter Forder, it appears like a mass fortress that conveys a symbolic defensive attitude. The dark semi-circular interior was built entirely out of local concrete and wood materials that contrast with each other creating a powerful sacred space. Also, this Roman Catholic Church was assembled through a layered concrete construction, with dominant uneven forms tying in and out of each other.
Unity Interaction
Initially, I was inspired by layered construction and discrete form, I played around with 3 types of assembly, which are the intersection, tangent, and parallel, and thinking about how to connect and separate the parts. I chose the intersection one for the next step, by iterate the intersected parts, I was curious about the connection and separation that could bring more flexibility as a special effect if the prototype becomes a scale for single or double living units. So after scaling and developing the unit, I defined the private and a public boundary as the closed and open side of it and then created a shared platform with hallway and vertical and horizontal landscape abstractly.
This animation shows that how the central platform shifted and connected with two units, I’m imagined since it was connected by two open and public boundaries, so this platform is a public and hot spot maybe for public and social activities like a garden or coffee bar.
- For the next Step
Pushing further, what can we learn from Austin? Reversing the city as the context from where to embed to what to extract, we aim to condense the city into a new form of a building - being plural and peculiar. Building on blockchain technologies, this term, we will investigate common building typologies to compose that what is shared by distributive means only. Researching by architecture, participants will compute co-operative urban forms and architect distributive computation. Built from participatory capacities, individually or in teams, the studio will finalize with a particular proposal on a specific site in Austin.
