Weeds Project
Weeds / Weeds Project
It is not planned.
People try to kill it.
It is valuable.
It can grow in the most lifeless places.
Manifesto
It takes very little to grow.
It spreads quickly. When you have one, you will have many.
It has many different types, a great amount of diversity.
It is small in scale.
It is hard to differentiate what is weed and what is flower.
It is messy, irregular, doesn’t have a set aesthetics.
This is the impression of my city Shenzhen. What makes up the majority of the city are the big buildings. These big buildings are mostly built for two reasons, either for making profit or for it to act as a symbol of success. With these driving forces, and the influence of modernism as a style and as a way of thinking, the result of the buildings being made are very similar.
The scale of the big building being so different from human scale, the living environment becomes far from people. The everyday life is being stripped down, cleaned up. Architecture and urban environments are being made in a way that reduces the idea of pleasure, culture, and possibility.
I wish to return to the basics of buildings and the resulting urban environment as a place to provide pleasure to people. However, instead of doing an urban project in the traditional sense, I wish to do a weeds project. . I wish to make modifications or addition to the small-scale architecture in a cheap way with low technology and readily available materials, so that any individuals or small businesses can easily copy and make their own alterations. Weeds project grows underneath the big things. It completes the eco-system, and provides nutrition to those bigger things.
Most importantly, weeds project is about diversity. The informal way of spreading and making can create the diversity that is not possible by professional architects and urban planners, because a group of individuals can not create the kind of variety done by many people.
Weeds Project
Diversity is the cure to modernism, so not everything is super clean, look the same, has only one way of thinking and one kind of style. It brings another way of looking at things. It brings back the everyday life. It brings back what architecture can provide to people, instead of what itself is.
Qualities of Weeds
It is not planned.
People try to kill it.
It is valuable.
It can grow in the most lifeless places.
It takes very little to grow.
It spreads quickly. When you have one, you will have many.
It has many different types, a great amount of diversity.
It is small in scale.
It is hard to differetiate what is weed and what is flower.
It is messy, irregular, doesn’t have a set aesthetics.
The architecture equivalent of weeds is illegal buildings. It is informal, not planned in the system. It is messy and irregular. People try to kill it. But how and who should decide what is weeds and what is not weeds, what is good and what is bad?
The image on the right shows some illegals buildings in Taibei. Compared with the buildings at the back, you can see that these informal buildings are full of nuances. Each of them is unique in their own way, but they fit comfortably together as a whole. It also feels like they grow out of the ground, they belong to the surrounding they are in.
When looking at the informal buildings around the world, you can see that they are making very interesting things. There are a lot of unexpected things happening in informal buildings. Very bold use of colors and materials. Many weird details in the buildings. Because it is informal, people usually just make what they like, what pleases them. Everybody enjoys different things and has different thinking, therefore the informal architecture is very vibrant and conveys a sense of pleasure. Also you would notice that in informal urban environment, buildings are free of being good or bad. The city is full of varieties, you just see them as different things. They are not posed as objects that are subject to judgement.
The First Weed
Instead of making illegal buildings, I want to make informal buildings in the formal system. This thesis summer, I will start with making the first weed. It is a hot pot restaurant located on the corner of two alleyways. The store is part of a taller building. It is on the ground floor and there are seven more stories above it. The store is 10 meters in length and 5.5 meters in width, consisting of 2 stories.
Thesis Statement
Weeds project is about urban design at the scale of architecture. I wish to return to the basics of buildings and the resulting urban environment as a place to provide pleasure to people. However, instead of doing an urban project in the traditional sense, I wish to do a weeds project. I wish to make modifications or addition to the small-scale architecture in a cheap way with low technology and readily available materials, so that any individuals or small businesses can easily copy and make their own alterations. Among the big trees of government’s urban planning and big developer projects, the weeds complete the eco system and provide nutrition to make the entire system more sustainable. The informal way of spreading from the weeds can achieve diversity that is not possible by professionals or organizations. The core of the word culture is diversity.
City is the byproduct of life force. The existing buildings are made from one life force. Weeds are from a different life force. People choose to make them not because of making profit. Pleasure is the life force that makes weeds. Weeds are life.
Each individual weeds project is completely within the discretion of individual or small business. It doesn’t touch any public area or property. This is about freedom. Also it is powerful, because it means that urban design can be done without government’s involvement and approval. It is necessary when government or big corporation’s agenda, value system and aesthetics are most likely different from people’s interest. Weeds project is making informal buildings in the formal system. It plays by the rules but is adding a different life force to the city.