Room Continuum A city of buildings and streets reformed as a continuous surface of rooms.
No defined public or private space No streets No separation between interior and exterior No categorised programme No distinction between built and unbuilt No residual space Project
Concept
The ‘Room Continuum’ is a critique of the conventional parameters of city design. It deviates from traditional propositional projects and instead follows from Archizoom’s No-Stop City and Piranesi’s Campo Marzio where design is used as a critical means. It looks at how a city may materialise without the parameters listed above and the subsequent effect on occupation. The project is composed of a collection of experimental fragments that explore the effect of a continuous surface of rooms on the City of Dundee.
As our cities expand with increasingly isolated buildings, we sought a structure for a more cohesive, more interactive and more collective context. The project, therefore, considers a continuous surface of rooms that are free from the constraints of the isolating building envelope. The inhabitant is able to occupy without predefined trajectories among an array of architectural conditions in varying rooms. With several openings to each, these spaces avoid becoming ‘terminal’ rooms and instead increase resident’s transitional overlap. For momentary retirements from such intense navigation, the inhabitant moves up to the plane above where the clear and vacant surface contrasts directly with the array of rooms below.
Site After concluding a survey of the city along with several readings, it was noted that Dundee could be read as a context framed by three boundaries. This is highlighted and expanded upon in an accompanying presentation board and provides a framework from which the applied form expands. The central strip, an area of high transitional overlap, is the starting point for the Room Continuum and the outer edges act as limits for future growth.
Jade Lau
Biying Wang
With an understanding of our present living conditions, it is difficult to imagine how we could occupy such a place. However, if we avoid the individualistic nature of ownership, ego and isolation, might our built environment look less like it does now? Perhaps if we focus on the collective agenda for people and cities, Room Continuum, with its two contrasting surfaces, is a concept that can already be traced in our current context.
Anastasia Konstantinidi
Velislava Mincheva
Reading of Dundee
Expansion Map 1:10 000
The City
The Room
Plan 1:200
No defined public or private space
No streets
No separation between interior and exterior
No categorised programme
No difference between built and unbuilt form
No residual space