HKU BAAS Design 4 - Building from Nowhere

Building from Nowhere: Seeing, Drawing and Making

ARCH3074 Portfolio XU Ben Celine Instructor: Tsang, Thomas H.K.

The energy is flowing everywhere and anytime, filling up the voids of the city and causing the kaleidoscopic variation of weather.

It is barely perceptible via eyes. Yet the insubstantial existence of it is hovering and lingering over the visible, which also shapes people’s experience of the built environment. The project is an exploration into the materialization of the intangible energy flow through a series of representational strategies from mapping, drawing, and modeling. It distills the essence of the invisible energy system and translates that with formal languages. The visible is eventually generated from the invisible.

/ Drips On Air To still the dynamic and intangible energy flow and situate the architecture

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/ Energy Balance - Urban Scale

/ Growing City And The Path For Energy The city can be abstracted as a discrete energy system which consists of buildings and in-between spaces. The balance equations document the path of the energy, which suggests the overuse and waste of energy in both urban and street(void space) scale. The idea of collecting the unused energy in the voids of the city and link the built environment into a continuous energy system is therefore becoming the anchor point of the project.

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/ Energy Balance - Street Scale

/ Erosion - Energy Topography

/ Floating Weather Station To bridge the intangible energy and tangible notations, the dropper acts as the media to decompose the thermal energy system into the field of drips. The notion is to build a micro weather station and drawing machine on air that detects and captures the meteorological phenomenon under the dynamic energy system, as well as tracking the depth and complexity of the built environment.

/ Dots - Projected Energy Diffusion

/ Maps Of Energy Field

/ Formation Of Tower Clusters For Energy

/ Lofting The Trace To reshape the energy map in three dimensions, the projected droplets are clustered and lofted into tower structures, which translate the weather and energy into architectural components.

/ Layered Maps And Image Of Infrastructures

/ Fragments Of The Complexity To echo the complicated urban fabric and energy system and define the utility boundary

In-take

Lifting

Channel

Cool-down

/ Collage Of Dialogues The path of the energy flow is largely influence by the interface between interior and exterior, which will lead to a variation of microclimates and interactive dialogues with the built environement.

/ Prototypes Of Interface

/ Fragmented Facade

/ Solidfying The Invisible To formalize the representational strategies of different building components and articulate architecture with city

/ Boundaries Of Inside And Outside

/ Notions Of The Diversity Another set of droplets see the formation of the layers, tower clusters and boundaries. The drawings simplifiy the complicated and diverse urban context into graphic languages.

/ Critical Boundaries Of Microclimate - Poles Of Temperatures

/ Map Of Context

/ Deconstruction Of Architecture

/ Notations Of Drawing And Making

/ Deconstructed Architecture Or The Post-Drawing-Machine To better illustrate the formation logic and complexity from both architecture itself and context, decomposing the project into slices simplifies the overall structure and provides a different representation strategy of narrating the integrity between architectural concept and entity.

/ Spatial Organisation Responding To The Urban Fabric

/ Architecture Volumes In Proposed Context

/ Situating The Architecture The context shapes the architecture and derives organic forms for different spatial functions. The quality of the space is defined by the essence of the energy field and complicated urban fabric, which is a strong denotation of the bond between architecture and urban context.

/ Spatial Quality And Circulation Around The Infrastructure

/ Structural Components

/ Integration And Order Following the formal languages on the major architectural components, which are towers, slabs and mesh, the documentation of weather and energy flow is decomposed into architectural forms and orders. This is a visible and integrated system derived from nowhere but the intangible, playing between inside and outside.

/ Moments Of Proximity To The City

/ The Invisible City Of Energy And Tower Clusters

/ Intersections Of Architecture And City The moments of intersection or proximity to the urban context are more clarified gestures of the intensive and penetrating formation ideology of the visualized energy structure, which relink the architecture and city as an organic whole.

/ Manifesto For The City The city is a collection of energy fragments and ambitions, which floats above its physical existence of buildings. The dream of expansion and development is intangible, yet the stillness of the voids is manifesting that.

2020 January