club house lobby

The interior design aims to make an attractive and welcoming club lobby of a residential quarter in Jiangxi Province.

The main intervention is a circular of bamboos(local material produced in that region), which creates a new layer of distinction within the interior. Bamboos are precisely "rooted" down beneath so that people, instead of the designer, can choose their pose of standing. The distances in-between is distinguished to form different dimensions of "doorways", thus providing a playground with unexpectable experiences.

Along with a gently-sloping ramp which creeps upstairs, a patch of "pour-in" exterior greenery that identify the main service zone, the lobby becomes a characteristic entry to the rest of the building.

Associative Design --- Synthetic Vernacular

Core Research Program at Berlage-Institute

The aim of the research is to design a site specific housing environment by means of associativity. The research is applied in Shanghai, in the district of Qing Pu. Nowadays China faces the question of how to develop a housing environment which is not a modernist type purely applied to accommodate the mass housing problem, but how to develop a synthetic vernacular; a form of housing that evolves from its historical heritage, its site specificity, and at the same time able to present alternatives to tabular rasa urbanism.

This project tries to learn from the spatial organization of the vernacular models, using parametric design technique to explore possible model of modern Chinese living, offering alternative strategies for middle income people.

The neighborhood model is based on the construction of a series of associative protocols, transformed and developed by local economical forces, housing policy, ecological environment, and cultural or social demands of Chinese people. They are developed mainly on 3 different scales, housing units, housing clusters, and the whole neighborhood.

A private skywell is introduced to give each unit a better physical performance, but more importantly, its spatial quality creates a modern way of chinese-living. However the form of the unit varies, the skywell is inbetween the active living space and still zone, generating a rich package of room arrangements. Rules are set with the constraints of the staircase to ensure the homogenous quality of all the skywells. The skywell in each floor negotiates with each other to give spaces to one above or below. This results in a semi-exterior space in each unit, and altogether forming different 3D characters.

With composition of pairs of units, a shared courtyard is formed within the housing cluster. Depending on the size variations, number of exits, and distribution of units, different junctions and street patterns can be generated, which defines its accessibility and collectiveness.

In opposition to the existing top-down assignment, a self-organizing system is established to allow specific programs to emerge. Each program requires different conditions in terms of land use, ground areas, location and specific preferences due to the domestic behaviors. Therefore, the size of the courtyards always adapts to accommodate different programs.

The morphological process performs in such an evolutionary way that it's never a simple repetition of courtyard arrangements, but an associative relationship affecting one upon each other. It provides a basis upon which programs in different domains and locations can be correlated and made to reinforce the vividness of the living environment.

The street pattern turns out to be a mixture of configurational properities of moderate connectivity. The frequency of 't ratio' and ' x ratio' , as well as the diversity in junction types ensure an efficient circulation system without losing the hierachical accessibility, producing the ambiguous perception and a sense of security like the vernacular do.

Final Video Presentation : http://www.dysturb.net/2007/associative-design-berlage/#more-239

PAO-ZHUAN-YIN-YU --- integrated urban environment

Regeneration of an obsolete transportation route, which is embraced in an undefined, chaotic environment as a result of urban expansion. There's no clear urban identity, nor traces of conscious planning, everything was floating in the air.

Therefore I proposed a dominent, self-standing system called PAO-ZHUAN-YIN-YU in Chinese, which can be understood as a series of catalyst, each sort of 'sacrifice' itself with associative consequence emerging from the next. And that's exactly how I see the value in DESIGN can perform and contribute.

As described by the concept diagram below, the catalyst can be a particular micro action, followed by a related macro effect. Again, something new is generated by the macro, triggering the next one... This on-going process is applied on three different scales: the site with its impact on the city, the overall site landscape and architecture, and human scale details(eg.materiality).

The intensive circulation flow through the site is anticipated to be the major force to activate the design, which is an integration of the main passage with local landscape, a neighbouring school campus, and the industrial heritage existed.

evolutionary city: the 'space fighter'

SpaceFighter is the project that wants to model the complexity of time based competitive urban developments. It seeks to model interactive urban developments. It wants to reflect and compare (in one second or a minute) imaginable prognotized interactive urban processes, actions, and reactions. It compares series of selected and possible projective simulations, results and outcomes of urbanistic chain reactions.

Group research project in collaboration with the Berlage Institute participants, PHD from TU Delft and MVRDV.

the back

A reading of a woman's back, highlighting the beautiful spine line from the falling hair, downwards to the backbone and legs, by the "left-over" in between.

the symphony

A materialized praise of the magnificant symphony played by human and nature.

man at window

A painting on meditation.