time As an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus continues to ravage the entire world, daily routine and regular activities have been gradually tethered within the interior space of the apartment. The tracking of time and the perception of space have completely melted and faded with the monotony of daily life. In the fog of uncertainty, all the architectural courses, tutorials, workshops, and studios have turned into a constant visual presentation on Zoom. The multisensory and synchronic capacities of imagination have been shaped into a passive visual interpretation. The cognition of the objects in the room has also become sensitive and unfamiliar…
Life in a Day during the COVID-19 pandemic time
Yucheng Dai 2020-2021
A1
A2
A1
D1
O1
C1
segmentation
B1
O2
D2 D1
C2
rebala
1
B2 B1
C1
lance
repartition
rooms The idea of this ‘exploratory’ drawing project was started on 7th May 2020. It was also inspired by an extraordinary documentary film Life in a Day. As Macdonald said that the film focused on a single day “because a day is the basic temporal building block of human life—wherever you are.” The concept of ‘a day’ in this drawing project becomes blurred and symbolic, it has been interpreted as the appearance of time. The apartment is situated in the city of Adelaide, including a living-dining area, kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms. It measures 56 square metres in total and is capable of two people living. In order to create a comprehensive and detailed drawing that inclusively contains every visible piece from the top of this house, I decided to make an ‘overcooked’ detailed ground floor plan. Within the drawing, every visible object and space that make up the ‘apartment world’ was carefully surveyed, measured and documented, along with the structure of external brick veneer walls and internal partitions. As time goes by, I slowly started to realised that object additions and subtractions on the mundane matters of daily life performed a constant process, and documented the space shifting during the pandemic time.
dining and kitchen Since the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, I have gradually moved away from the takeaways and started to explore home cooking techniques. So, I spend far more time in the kitchen than I did before the pandemic. The stockpiling of ingredients also offers a lot of options. As homecooked meals have always been the comfort food for me, enjoying the meals has become one of the daily highlights during this special period of time.
home studio Since the university campus was temporarily closed and all the equipment and computers currently can only use via remote access, all the studio assignments and tasks had to be conducted and completed in-home. I gradually accepted that uncertainty is the norm in life. So, the bedroom was slowly transformed into a temporary home studio.
yucheng.dai.au@gmail.com