PORTFOLIO 2024 - Selected Works

ARCHITECTURE

KAVIKA LAU

SELECTED WORKS APRIL 2024

NYC Subway Layered Infrastructures

In this 10 days AA Visiting School course, we are asked to dissect the New York Subway system, to observe, speculate its history, elements, forms, language, structures, hence re-design & re-define the NY Subway in a contemporary manner. At the beginning, we made a diorama out of 3 main parts of a subway station - Overground, Entrance & Concourse, Underground. We then chose the elements that mostly represent these 3 parts and used them in testing the Wasp script in Grasshopper & Rhino, both for learning & experimenting the aesthetics & forms generated.

Elements of Entrance & Underground

Dismantled Green Steel Overground Structure

Aggregation Test 2

# of component = 650

Same part = FALSE

Same connection = TRUE

Signages

# of component = 300

Same part = TRUE

Same connection = TRUE

Aggregation Test 1

Payphone

Painted Steel Column

# of component = 200

Same part = TRUE

Same connection = TRUE

Aggregation Test 3

Other than the initial Wasp testing, we then chose the Concrete Tunnel (from underground), Steel Green Structures (from overground) & Railings (from railway) to further explore the verticality of the Subway and their possibilities in generating new vertical forms from those elements. The carriage itself is also further examined and dissected, a new type of carriage is then designed out of the elements extracted from it. They are then put on the tracks designed, allowing the transit between different levels within the same structure.

Diorama + Aggregation Railings

Steel Structure

Festival of Cosmic Resurrection

Type Year Site

Tutors

Software

Masterplanning, Conceptual, Research, Festive 2019-2020, 5th Year

Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China

Rahesh Ram, Sam Coulton Cinema 4D, Octane

Souls (in the form of Artefacts) are gathered in the Vessel of Souls, which sits at the heart of the city of Beijing – the Tiananmen Square, and ready to be discharged to every corner of the city during the Festival of Cosmic Resurrection. Centre to the structure, stood the Cosmic Tower, which symbolically connects the spirits of Ancestors from the Cosmo, to the Vessel of Souls & to other sites representing different Chinese traditional cultures such as the Tower of Taoism.

During each Festival of Cosmic Resurrection, the position of the Vessel of Souls & Tiananmen Square acted as a rotational pivot in the masterplan of Beijing, for deciding the project site of various cultures. The Vessel & these sites are then connected through millions of lanterns (which symbolize millions of ancestors’ souls), thus visualizing the carefully calculated time distortions & compensations made in traditional Chinese calendar.

Layout of the 108 grid, 72+36

The Growing Constellation Altering Sites: 2023-2041

According to visualized distortions of chinese calendar, the venues of cultural celebrations are different at every festival. As said in an old Chinese sayings about calendar - “19 Years 7 Intercalary (十九年七閏)”, a complete calibration cycle is done during 2023-2041. And by connecting strings of lanterns (representing souls) to varying sites of these 7 celebrations happened within these 19 years, a new type of constellation is formed. In addition, at the upcoming festivals, the structure at the oldest site would be removed & replaced by the newest structure at the new venue, hence generating a ever-changing constellation.

Constellation formed over 2023-2041

The Tower of Taoism

The Tower of Taoism is designed according to Tao’s largest ritualLuo Tian Da Jiao (羅天大醮). The Ritual itself is composed of many smaller individual rituals, which happens at different time. These smaller rituals are then expressed as spatial configurations, experienced by visitors either by the use of materials, colours, forms, circulations, or even certain actions to be performed before proceeding to the next space. These spaces are also arranged in the same order as the scheduled individual rituals. Visitors would then experienced this largest ritual of Tao by completing a tour of the tower from top to bottom.

The Cosmic Tower

Embd Summerhouse

The Summerhouse is owned by a fanatic of pictures who had hundreds of pictures at his place. We took that idea of pictures and utilize picture frames as our design language. Hence creating various kinds of frames for different sizes of portraits, paintings & photos. The design aimed to elevate the flat pictures into 3D beings, therefore the frames are laid out with different depths to embrace the 3-dimesionality of spaces. We decided to use woods of different kinds & thicknesses since the summerhouse itself is primarily constructed by woods. Small lightings are added to simulate light installed on site & the battery expressed itself as the utilities like boilers & electric switches.

Although the topic of the year is about recycling, the project is mostly led by my own interests of kinetic forms & mechanical parts. Therefore I collected ‘antiques’ from various markets in U.K. such as the Portobello market, Brick Lane, & a small market in a secret corner in Brighton. The collection includes some mechanical clocks and two typewriters. They were then manually dismantled into many small parts, one of them as a display of parts and the other was combined with the clock parts and remodelled into an architectural proposal. The aesthetic of the kinetics & machines demonstrate a strong language, and also suggest relationships between spaces & dynamic circulations around site.

The Caring Community™

Poet Filippo Tommaso

produced the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909. Antonio Sant’Elia’s vision was for a

and mechanized city of

which he saw not as a mass of individual

but a vast, multi-level, interconnected and integrated urban conurbation designed around the “life” of the city. Russian Futurism was a movement of Russian poets and artists who adopted the principles of Filippo Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which embraced the rejection of the past, and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry it also advocated the modernization and cultural revitalisation

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin and flourished in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and

The Caring Community™ is a critic, metaphor of our society under the current overly digitalized & mechanized era. On a superficial stage, this housing project presents itself as a ‘fun’, ‘warm’ & ‘comforting’ home for all people at different social levels, promoting inhabitants to fight the worsening trend of stratification in London.

The project starts off from a comprehensive research about machines & architecture. I then focused on the relationship of the digital & biological - designing varies machine concept that monitors biological data of the inhabitants. The Teddy - the representative element in the model - is filled with all kinds of machines taking data such as pulse rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate & body temperature etc., however it retains its outer soft fur & its cute look to soothen uneasy emotions, even knowing that datas are taken from your body. It then led to other researches about social structure & technology such as Lewis Mumford’s The Myth of the Machine, Megamachine; Pyramidal systems; B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two; Panopticon; how they represent themselves as harmless orders, persuading everyone in the society to blindly believe only in the numbers shown by machines, without truly knowing meanings of their actions/decisions, but only ratings & numbers on the digital screens.

The vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment It was, in effect, a British equivalent to futurism although with doctrinal differences, and Lewis was deeply hostile to the futurists.

Model of new machine concepts

The Teddy, within new machine concepts

The Teddy

Eye: LED

Nose:

Motion-activated Speaker

Motion Sensor

Bluetooth: Phone Control Interface

Bluetooth: Bluetooth Receiver

Bluetooth: Bluetooth-Activated LED

3D Printed Shell: + Wood Filler + Sanding + Flocking

Sound Card: Connected to Motion sensor & Speaker

Cables in tubes: Connecting all components

External USB Charger: Power Supply - USB LED, LED, Motion Sensor, Speaker

Inhabitants are forced to be ‘Caring’ to neighbours, ‘Environmental friendly’ & ‘Healthy’, by the use of a point system and data collected from various machines installed in every corner. Each individual’s scoring depends on how well they behave ‘socially’, ‘environmentally’ & ‘healthily’.

FORCED COMFORT - Elements of fun & comfort are applied to motivate inhabitants to engage with the scoring; to relief from the supervision by machines and from the underlying mechanical data collection & analysis.

Tannery of the Moroccans

Type Year Site Tutors Software

Industrial, Research

2015-2016, 3rd Year

2-18 Britannia Row, Islington, N1 8PA, London, U.K.

Stefan Lengen, Tim Culverhouse Rhino

The Tannery is for the former leather shop owner couples who used to lived in Morocco and migrated to London with their dog. They found out the vanished culture once florished in Islington of agriculture has now almost been forgotten, only having meat shops and leather selling shops around in the area. It is then decided to have a tannery that could act as a reminder for the public about multiple pasts that once dominated the area and whole country - the Agricultureland, expressed through generating products from animals like leathers; the Machine Age & Industrialisation, expressed through aesthetics of machineries.

Tips_On_Air

Experimental 2015-2016, 3rd Year

2-18 Britannia Row, Islington, N1 8PA, London, U.K. Stefan

This project is the predecessor of Tannery of the Moroccans, inspired by an everyday action: Shoe tying & untying. It is an experimental project focusing on the movements of fingers and how they relates to the leather shoe alongside with time. Therefore generating spaces by the observation made from their dynamic relationships. The spaces are then elaborated and transformed into an architecture that sits itself into a secret corner/gap of site, which bizarrely having a steel structure stretching out to the street and above the pedestrians, locating in Islington.

Lengen, Tim Culverhouse

In addition to traditional auditory and sequential classroom teachings, students are encouraged to foster creativity through exploration and self-directed learning. The school places particular emphasis on seven (7) visions, as illustrated on the right. To integrate these concepts, a Rainbow Learning Staircase was designed as a symbolic representation, promoting joyful, diverse, and limitless learning in a creative and spiritual manner for the students. Facilitated by centralized circulation and interconnected clusters of spaces, this design not only streamlines school management but also enhances connectivity, allowing students to navigate seamlessly through various functions.

Kwun Tong

As the school’s vision is “快樂校園・創新未來 ”, we drew inspiration from UNESCO’s concept of a “Happy School.”—characterized by warmth and friendliness; ensuring a secure environment free from bullying; and embraces open and green spaces helpful to both learning and playing. Therefore, we decided to incorporate numerous open areas, emphasizes transparency, and features flexible spaces catering to diverse functions to nurture students’ curiosity. Our aim was to establish a safe environment that fosters learning and creativity through exploration and interaction. Given that the site being surrounded by 4 distinctive spaces—a Secondary school, a Slope, a park and a carriageway—we carefully considered these elements to strike a balance between the primary school’s needs and the impact from its surroundings.