d esign :

s T udio housing in T he inner W es T

Undefined Space in Empowering Housing

One of my second-year programs discusses the possibility of undefined spaces for social housing. Undefined space is not a space of waste. I believe that the undefined space is a place for life to happen. During the last 80s, the Chinese government build a lot of social housing in the cities Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which allowed a lot experiments about both social housing and commercial housing. My grandparents happened to live in one of these social housings, which sits above a five-level restaurant. My grandparents’ house had a large courtyard that was shared with their neighbours. The neighbours that were living above got involved since they had to pass by the courtyard every day. My grandparents built a fish tank with a bathtub for the children in the community, set up a table tennis table to hold matches with neighbours.....The courtyard becomes a public space that was shared by the community, either people from the upper apartment can even access the garden visually through windows.

When I design the project, I tried to give back some initiative to the residents by creating a undefined shared space between every two apartments. Besides offering a generous garden, this flexible space encouragpeople to communicate, and more importantly, to get involved in their living environment.

During the last 80s, the Chinese government build a lot of social housing in the cities of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which allowed a lot of experiments about both social housing and commercial housing. My grandparents happened to live in one of these social housings, which sits above a five-level restaurant. Unlike most social housings, my grandparents’ house had a large courtyard that was shared with their neighbour. The impressive part about this courtyard is that the neighbourhood constantly modifies it according to its own preference. Even the neighbours that were living above got involved in it since they had to pass by the courtyard every day. Some might put their pets there, and others might set up a table tennis table for a match. For my grandparents, they chose to build a fish tank with a bathtub next to the garden so I would visit them more often. (also keep the fish safe from the cats) This courtyard which was originally designed for two houses became the plaza for the whole neighbourhood.

This childhood memory inspired me to rethink about the universal and empowering design. It taught me that people love spaces that allow the expression of themselves, and they hardly follow the instruction manual written by the architects. It is also what makes a building vigorous.

Undefined Space in Empowering Housing

One of my second-year programs discusses the possibility of undefined spaces for social housing. Undefined space is not a space of waste. I believe that the undefined space is a place for life to happen. During the last 80s, the Chinese government build a lot of social housing in the cities of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which allowed a lot of experiments about both social housing and commercial housing. My grandparents happened to live in one of these social housings, which sits above a five-level restaurant. My grandparents’ house had a large courtyard that was shared with their neighbours. The neighbours that were living above got involved since they had to pass by the courtyard every day. My grandparents built a fish tank with a bathtub for the children in the community, set up a table tennis table to hold matches with neighbours.....The courtyard becomes a public space that was shared by the community, either people from the upper apartment can even access the garden visually through windows.

When I design the project, I tried to give back some initiative to the residents by creating a undefined shared space between every two apartments. Besides offering a generous garden, this flexible space encourages people to communicate, and more importantly, to get involved in their living environment.

T hesis : d o A i d re AM of e L ec T ronic s heep ?

The short answer is yes. AIs have learnt to with our mementoes, with our most obscene desires. Like Dadaism and Surrealism, the result of the Convolutional Neural Network often presents us with an uncanny scene of dislocation, juxtaposition, and transformation of symbolic images. By short-circuiting the AI, we can use the AI to embody architectural design with a higher degree of spontaneity and automatism to paranoically re-imagine an art space of torture and terror. As a result, the architecture of surrealist objects is a mediator to psychoanalyse and decipher our collective dream.

“Paranoiac-critical activity organizes and objectivizes in an exclusivist manner the limitless and unknown possibilities of the systematic association of subjective and objective ‘significance’ in the irrational ...it makes the world of delirium pass onto the plane of reality.”

The AI can be considered as an Apollonian apparatus which presents divine shapes and forms from the dream (Traum), however, the poem input is on the side of Dionysus, an analogy to intoxication(Rausch). A dreamer following the principle of individuation can be seen as an apollonian, but if a dream is derived from the mementoes, it became part of the Dionysus choruses.

On the other hand, Lacanian psychologists develop psychoanalysis so that humans can better understand the dream and unconscious mind. What if we can do a psychoanalysis session with the dreaming AI? When an Algorithm is producing images after deep learning, in a way, it can be more paranoic than most of us. By intentionally short-circuiting this AI, we can use the AI as the collage, dreaming apparatus to serve as a mediator to describe our dream for us. Unlike a common AI illustrator, the program does not aim to create images that “make sense” but for the sake of paranoically exploring our collective dreams stored on the internet. The AI helps us to introspect on ourselves, to investigate what we unconsciously want from architecture, what we unconsciously want from our lives.

Aesthetics serves a function. A function that can even be used for torture or rehabilitation. A series of secret cells and torture centres designed by Alphonse Laurencic are built in Barcelona in 1938. Architecture as spheres, more or less, functions as a such machines for rehabilitation.The torture room aims to elaborate people from their “ko-isoliert” bubbles, so links between people and their milieu can be connected. A series of “images” of museums are developed to demonstrate how percept museum/gallery spaces.