I. 414 STUDIO

UCLA Material Research Institute

‘Industrial

Extension’

Collaboration: Mei . 2023

Instructor _ Simon Kim

The measurable and undeniable realities of climate change, finite resources of building materials, environmentally detrimental building practices make us all pause and reconsider how we as architects, as a discipline, as individuals and as society should rethink the ways we responsibly reimagine and inhabit the future of our built environment. As crisis impede, our collective sensibilities naturally evolve

While architecture as a discipline has a long history of engaging prior architectures as reference, it predominantly did so within disciplinary classifications, languages, and values of its own cannon (i.e neo-classism, postmodernism, de-constructivism). There has also been other recent attempts, more on the conceptual domain, to make new architecture with old architecture

In current paradigm shift though, there will a different stance in engaging existing buildings, one that directly confronts the physical and material realities/potentials at hand. As we contemplate architectural potential for spaces that were made for other needs at other times, for materials that might not be directly conducive to present needs and meanings sought; as we decide what to salvage, what to reappropriate, what to reconfigure, what and how to add to; and as we try to make sensible new tectonics for a culture that evolves rapidly, our framing of the problem begins to shift from the territory of responsible ethics towards the territory of potential emergent aesthetics.

In time, the natural beauty of rock objects fades and is replaced by a new set of emotional or aesthetic associations intertwining with steels cages.

This initial conceptual prototype shows the beatuy of organic, chaotic, disordered, and natural form.

Exploreing from chaotic, wild steels and stones towards organic cages and bearing within a common legibility instead of too messy.

Then the following iterations generate order out of chaos while producing a unifying effect that can negotiate with the other pieces that seem to be all different from one anther.

The legibility and coherence is defined through the relationship between the cages and programs sizes and shapes, which some are contained within cages, some are intersect the cage, some are offset from cages. So that the cages can not only serve as structures but also become part of the interior of the building. In this way, we are able to have a series of consistent options at diagrammatic level.

Collage Drawing

The design projected our perspective over the site in terms of how we imagine the future world an even more industrial statement.

The entire building engulfs and digests the existing silos and scaffoldings, then captures a hybridity of traditional industrial machines and futuristic capsules encapsulating in bright cages. They are excessively expressed more than columns, beams and open plan, yet define the space without enclosure, isolate moments and objects without solid separations. Somehow it delivers the utmost architectural exteriority in the way kind of internalized of cages.

Physical Model

As shown, the arrangement of programs containing in each objects follows the mechanical producing stream line. Ground is open up and sunk down for public activities, like lobby for reception, exhibition area, as well as final manufacturing space for assembly and finishing. The volumes are suspended by the steel frames with less partitions. For the Circulation, the 3 cores designed improve the efficiency around all of the floating objects which are articulated through bridges.