11 minute read
Projects
NEW RESOURCES: PROJECTS
195 New Resources
City from a Grain Sherly Zhang Neural Interiors Yueheng Lu
This project proposes a new method of rearranging, recycling, and replacing existing building materials across multiple spatial and temporal scales. It also works on an urban experience park that makes visible the extraction and aggregation of natural resources to build 21st-century cities. This project proposes that the future of interior living in Shenzhen embrace ultimate leisure and comfort by integrating new programmable materials, AI-powered responsive space configuration, and mixed-media technology. It is a reimagination of urban materiality at a personal level.
Projects 196
Re-imagine Huaqiangbei Qiushi Deng + Zheng Ren
Based on a set of analyses via different tool kits, this project points out the fragmentation and disconnectivity of Shenzhen. Using Huaqiangbei as a site, this project utilizes available resources and materials to build a megastructure system and create new vistas for the city.
Urban Villages to Gardens Ye Chan Shin
This project works on strategies for radical reuse of the urban village typology in Shenzhen. AI technologies are used to scan underlying structures of the buildings. Ultimately, the urban villages would be used as valuable construction material resources for the whole city.
City from a Grain The Geologic Processes of Construction
197 Sand is critical not only to building materials like concrete and glass but also to silicon and other technology products. But due to overbuilding and intensive use there is a global sand crisis, and the shortage of sand is a preview of other, more severe shortages of construction materials to come. This project proposes an urban experience park that makes visible how natural resources are extracted and aggregated to build 21st-century cities. The park is a network of specific sites that selectively preserve the architecture of the recent past while excavating the geology below. It draws reciprocal connections between above ground urban developments and underground geological formations, showing that the built environment is intricately interwoven with processes that are far older than cities themselves. It aims to educate the public about the resources of the city and how they can be radically reused. Shenzhen is a city that grows and rebuilds itself at an unprecedented speed, outstripping the geologic resources that it demands such as sand and other minerals. In face of the impending resource shortage, it is also a city that has also opened areas to mining and geologic exploration. This project works on methods to rearrange, recycle, and replace existing building materials across multiple spatial scales and a temporal scale of 50 years. By revealing the hidden story of urban materiality, “City from a Grain” also advocates for more environmental responsibility in the era of the Anthropocene.
Shenzhen is a city that is rebuilding itself at an incredible speed. By scanning through the aerial image of Shenzhen, we are able to identify different residential typologies, which correspond to years of construction, and likely deconstruction. Given the active rebuilding process happening in the city, and the abundant resources buried under that city, the project envisions a typological process that rearranges building materials at the city scale to maximize efficiency and sustainability. With the assistance of neural networks, zoning patterns could also be generated at the scale of blocks that inspire future planning and design arrangements.
The experience park is a network of three sites that selectively preserve the architecture of the recent past while excavating the geology below. When walking from one end to the other, the public would be able to draw connections between aboveground urban developments and underground geological formations, and get a better understanding of how much change humans have brought about in the era of the Anthropocene.
Post-extraction Landscape
Neural Interiors Furnishing the Future
203 Located in the Pearl River Delta, the high-tech industry and electronics manufacturing center has exhibited its great potential for rapid prototyping and producing modularized products. Therefore, the future of interior living in the City of Shenzhen is projected to embrace ultimate leisure and comfort by integrating new programmable materials, AI-powered responsive space configuration, and mixed-media technology. Apartment living is no longer bounded by physical space. By adding dynamic and virtual space to the traditional static rooms, the interior experience will be much more expansive and flexible. With the help of AR/VR and micro-environment controlling systems, the living room can be transformed into a virtual cinema where you spend quality time with family and friends; a bathtub could emerge in your bedroom with spectacular views as if you were bathing in the mountains of Hokkaido. Separate furniture pieces are replaced by a continuous topography of functional regions made from uniform programmable material. This new material is able to form anything from cozy seating to a smooth working surface due to its various granularity.
By training multiple networks of Pix2Pix, a new interior landscape is imagined in two steps: generating the layouts of functional zones and the 3D forms of its associated furniture. This AI experiment has created a brain of the apartment that accommodates the ever-changing mind of its inhabitants.
Right: AI Generated Furniture Formed by New Programmable Material: Various seatings are automatically generated by pix2pix network pipeline, outline-depth map-modularized model.
205 Neural Interiors: Furnishing the Future
Top & Bottom: Imagine a New Type of Material: With the rapid development in programmable material, it is reasonable to imagine a future material with distributed electricity, water, heating & cooling system to transform traditional furniture at home. Following page - Top: Perspective of generated furniture “transformer”: Sofa, side table, and working desk all integrated in one.
Yueheng Lu 206
209 The project proposes an analytic atlas of how humans and machines experience Shenzhen urbanism. It considers the new overlapping demands of autonomous machines with human aspirations for a future urban environment.
Our project has two phases. In the first phase of research, we built a toolkit to analyze the city related to the views, like the Isovist and the building density, etc. Shenzhen’s views are fragmented and disconnected, with substantial variations by density. The toolkit will inventory human and machine views of the city, compare them, and find common ground between them. Building on this toolkit, in the second phase we design a network of structures that improve these view conditions, as well as making the city denser. We want to build a megastructure system to create a new image of Shenzhen as well as bold new vistas of the city.
Top Right: Interior collage of the experience of a new commercial megastructure.
Through computational Isovist vision analysis and typological classification, development priorities can be automatically generated. Following page - Bottom: The electronics district is reimagined as a hub of media experiences. Reimagine Huaqiangbei: Megastructures for Shenzhen’s Panorama
Qiushi Deng + Zheng Ren 212
213 This project proposes a strategy for radical reuse of the Urban Village typology in Shenzhen, slicing, deconstructing, expanding, and reconstructing it into a new network of interlocking residences and gardens. It uses AI techniques to scan the underlying structure of the buildings, slice and reassemble them based on structural logic. Ultimately, it aims to use the urban villages as a valuable construction material resource. During its explosive economic and urban development, thousands of undocumented urban villages were built in Shenzhen. Once considered illegal architecture and subject to demolition and redevelopment, the Urban Villages are now reconsidered as sustainable, essential, and hybrid places. However, the density of the urban villages has reached a peak, preventing dwellers from accessing light and nature. In this project, the urban village apartments are formally dissected into puzzle like structures, which enables us to explore spaces for light and nature.
With cutting-edge technology in Shenzhen, scanning drones, construction cranes with a diamond cutting blade, and 3D printing construction, the project is not far-fetched. Like in Tangram Puzzles, the push-and-pull movement of dissected apartments creates space for the light and nature.
Right: Assembly Technique : Reassembly pushes construction techniques in Shenzhen to the max. Achieving almost-complete reuse of the heritage is possible by thinking, limiting the construction methods, and controlling the process.
215 Urban Villages to Urban Gardens: Radical Building Reuse in Shenzhen
Top: Sectional rendition of the recomposed space: The study of assembly shows possible variants in dynamic space composition from the existing pieces of the Urban Village. The building’s recomposition puts a new perspective on how we think of historical heritage as a material that can build a new urban fabric. Bottom: Raw Data by Drone Scanning: With the technology of Shenzhen, massive drone scanning is possible. Drones are the most proper way to scan Urban Villages because they can fly between narrow buildings better than other scanning devices. Following page: Data to X-ray of the Building by Pix2Pix: The X-ray training set was made by; first teaching TensorFlow to learn building facades by Pix2Pix schematic images drawn by a human. Secondly, from the schematic illustrations to the structural diagram.
Ye Chan Shin 216
Reassembled Urban Village: AI-generated Urban Village can save the most material and help us imagine dynamic space and the possibility for adaptive renovation.
NEW NATURE
Introduction After the establishment of Shenzhen as a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the agricultural and industrial sectors went through dramatic transformation reflected in their processes, production trends, and territorial occupation in the city. Shenzhen’s economic and land structure turned from an agriculture-dominated one to an industry-dominated one.
The city has turned into a platform and mechanism for economic development, R&D investment, and ubiquitous innovation, leading to high-quality production and particular rates of customization for the electronics market and other sectors.
Now that industries have shifted from labor-intensive to technology-intensive ones, processes have become safer and eventually can be open to the public.
Multiple production processes and modes of habitability underline current Shenzhen’s urban dynamics. While addressing food supply, consumer demand, maintenance, and industry innovation, a results-driven network of activities enables new relationships with the environment: resource extraction, greenhouse emissions, energy, and waste become tangible elements in the production sequence.
The innovative and technology-centered context of Shenzhen along with its specific water, vegetation, geographic, and
225 urbanistic conditions, calls for a reevaluation of production processes and mechanical systems. By rearranging and reconnecting traditional workflows, new modes of infrastructure can be addressed in order to transform the habitability and connectivity of Shenzhen’s land and cityscape. Climate regulation, species conservation, and sustainable production trends in the framework of a circular economy become naturalized values in the urban dynamic.
The idea of a New Nature draws on local natural resources and technological advances to shape hybrid infrastructures to host Shenzhen’s productive, recreational, and living needs, enabled and conducted by AI generative process. These hybrids will perform in the realm of data and responsiveness, socioeconomic growth and sustainability, existing urban configurations and new territories.
New Nature
Introduction
Ecological Conservation
Sustainable Production Adaptability
Resilience
The vulnerabilities of climate change put environmental, economic, and cultural systems all at risk. New Nature recognizes the inextricable links between these systems and addresses change through an adaptive design approach. Responsive biotechnical designs can accommodate physiological, ecological, and economic needs amidst future uncertainties, which are particularly exacerbated in a climate like Shenzhen’s.
