Weeds Project
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 a profit or for them to act as a symbolize success. With these driving forces, and the influence of modernism as a style and as a way of thinking, the resulting buildings are all very similar to one another.
The scale of the big buildings being so different from the human scale, the living environment becomes distant from people. The everyday life feels 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 hope to make modifications or addition to the small-scale architecture in a cheap way with low technology and readily available materials, so that any individual or small business can easily copy and make their own alterations. The Weeds Project grows underneath the big things. It completes the eco-system, and provides nutrition to those bigger things.
Most importantly, The 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 cannot create the kind of variety done by many people.
Weeds Project
Diversity is the cure to modernism, so not everything is super clean, looks 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.
Qualities of Weeds
Weeds are not planned.
People try to kill them.
They are valuable.
They can grow in the most lifeless places.
They take very little to grow.
They spread quickly. When you have one, you will have many.
They have many different types, a great amount of diversity.
They are small in scale.
It is hard to differentiate what is weed and what is flower.
They are messy, irregular, don’t have a set aesthetics.
An architecture equivalent of weeds can be observed in illegal buildings. It is informal, not planned as a system. It is messy and irregular. People try to kill it. But how and who should decide what are weeds and what aren’t weeds, what is good and what is bad for the city?
The image on the left shows some illegal buildings in Taipei. Compared with the buildings in the back, you can see that these informal buildings are full of nuances. Each of them is unique in its own way, but they fit comfortably together as a whole. It also feels like they grow out of the ground, they belong to the surroundings they are in.
There are a lot of unexpected things happening in informal buildings: very bold use of colors, many weird details, a variety of materials. In an informal building, people usually just make what they like, what pleases them. Everybody enjoys different things and has different ideas; therefore, the informal architecture is very vibrant and conveys a sense of pleasure. Also you would notice that in an 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 within the formal system. This thesis summer, I made the first weed. The site 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
Terms
The 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 hope to make modifications or additions to the small-scale architecture in a cheap way with low technology and readily available materials, so that any individual or small business 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 an individual or a 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 while adding a different life force to the city.