2009/11/22
Tree of Life 1
The Tree of Life… is the source of terrestrial fertility and life. Human life is descended from it; its fruit confers everlasting life.
To bring all lives together, the concept of the Tree of Life aligns with Lappset’s 3-Generation idea. To translate this metaphoric meaning into a reality, the Tree of Life Playground transforms a 20x20m flat land into a multi-functional terrain that contains traditional playground elements such as a slide, distinctive manmade landforms, innovative interactive devices and an artificial Tree of Life. The Tree of Life Playground aims to provide fun, leisure and happiness for all: people of all age, race and gender, and with distinct personalities, different lifestyle and physical capacities. It also blurs the boundaries between a traditional playground for children, a garden for elderly and an urban park for teenagers and adults to hangout and exercise.
The Tree of Life Playground is consisted of a variety of landscape elements, which include wooden terraces, a grass slope, and sandy spots. It is a terrain that provides multiple options, enabling children to invent their own game and adults to relax in their own way. It is a perfect landscape to play tag as well as lying down and take a nap. Freedom is maximized by the landscape variety and thus activities of different nature can be performed side by side under various degrees of social interaction and privacy. Physical activities such as running, climbing and dancing can be performed while others are day-dreaming, reading, resting, chatting, and taking a nap at wall niches and mid-air platforms. Group of different sizes may scatter in the playground such as playing hide-and-seek, or they may concentrate in one location such as playing with the interactive LED wall, dancing at the Tree of Life, having fun at the sand beds, and even having a yoga class at the wooden terraces.
2009/11/11
2009/09/30
Foguang Temple, China
Built in AD 857, the Eastern Hall of the Foguang Temple in Wutai Mountains in Shanxi remains as the third oldest surviving timber structure in China. Features such as bold and simple columns and hugely exaggerated brackets at the eaves belong to the Tang Dynasty.
The Ring - Toronto
A few days ago I have submitted my entry to the 3rd Advanced Architecture Contest: Self-Sufficient City. The project proposes a complete makeover of Toronto's highway network into a RING of multi-functional infrastructure that generates energy, manages water and transports citizens. Targeting the urban needs of a post-carbon era in 2059, and manipulating the highways and city grid of 2009, the RING promotes a clean solution that connects and benefits all districts in the city, and creates an interdependent relationship among them. The proposal introduces two novel ideas on clean energy and water management: the sewage turbines and bio-filter water treatment. The project corresponds to some main characteristics of a 21st century city, which include self-sufficiency, environmental responsibility, urban connectivity and multi-functionality.
Some key concepts of the proposal:
1) Reinforce the periphery of the city to denounce urban sprawl.
2) Connect and benefit all districts of the city. Entire city becomes a coherent system, i.e., a flush of toilet in North York can help to generate electricity for a home in Scarborough and provide clean water for a garden in downtown Toronto.
3) Create a balanced relationship between city and the environment by introducing bio-filtration to treat urban grey water.
4) Introduce a multi-purposed infrastructure.
5) Reuse existing urban elements: the highway system and the grid planning.
6) Develop sustainable utility management, especially on waste to energy.
7) Create a system that accommodate urban growth and evolution.
Oberbaum Bridge
My article Persistent Crossing: Bridging Berlin's Conflicting Desires will be published in Issue 22 of the magazine On site. http://www.onsitereview.ca/ The piece depicts the complex identities and memories of the famous Oberbaum Bridge in Berlin, Germany.
Two times I visited Berlin in the past six years and both times I fell in love with the Oberbaum Bridge. From Calatrava’s central bay, the view to the west reveals a complex skyline consisting of buildings from almost every era, and to the east the tranquil river scenery of metropolitan Berlin fading to its eastern suburbs, with Jonathan Borofsky’s 100 feet tall sculpture Molecule Man on the river. I remember what it was like to walk through the lights and shadows of the colonnade under the railway viaduct in the afternoon, along with the many bikers and dog-walkers, beside the busy traffic of trams and cars, and feeling the frequent vibrations of the u-bahn trains above my head. Nothing, not even memories or tales, can replace the simple pleasure of walking on the Oberbaum. The reconstructed bridge may not live up to the expectations of some architects to unfold the future glories of the German capital, yet in its own right it has successfully drawn a closure to the past epoch and is paving the way to a future with fewer political burdens and plenty of life.
Frog's Dream in XXI
My project Frog's Dream will be published in the upcoming issue of XXI in Istanbul.
http://www.xxi.com.tr/
2009/09/28
Deconstructed Sailboat
A simple model, sort of a legacy from our Euro trip earlier this year.
Deconstructed Sailboat from K F C on Vimeo.
City and Memories
A postcard competition for the LOG magazine.
In the City of Black-and-White, every speck of grime on the timber sidings of an old house calls on memories of transient splendors of a great city. In the labyrinth of houses whose wooden façades had never known of paint for centuries, contemporary urban landscape is merely a series of frozen images, monotonous and serene, like real-size postcards for inhabitants to look back with nostalgia at their own childhood. It is here where humble architecture stands unchanged beyond generations. Only memories and tales are subject to renewal from time to time.
Frog's Dream
Recently I have participated in the Re-burbia Design Competition. Organized by Inhabitat.com and Dwell Magazine, the contest challenged designers to come up with future alternatives for the North American Suburbia. In response to the prospect of vacant mcmansions and abandoned cul-de-sacs, my project Frog's Dream transforms vacant mcmansion communities at the periphery of a city into bio-filter water treatment wetlands that filters urban grey water. My project was first selected as a finalist to generate online discussions and voting, and later received the first place for the jury prize.
The project has appeared online at numerous websites and design blogs, including Archdaily, Bldgblog, Bustler, Core77, Inhabitat, World Architecture News, etc. The project will also be published in Dwell Magazine in the US, XXI Magazine in Turkey and C3 Magazine in South Korea.
http://www.re-burbia.com/
Project description:
Many scientists and climatologists suggest we are fighting a losing battle against climate change, loss of rain forests and wetlands, and extinction of species. Historians who study Maya or Angkor warn of an inevitable collapse to civilization when natural resources are overused. Some real estate analysts predict that a change of lifestyle, shrink of household size and a rise of energy prices will seal the final downfall of suburbia.
What makes a better opportunity than the decline of suburbia to revolutionize our unsustainable suburban lifestyle and land-use, and to pursue for a balance of co-existence between man and nature? What to make of all those abandoned mcmansions and their deserted suburban neighborhoods in the future?
In response to this anticipated future scenario, the project Frog’s Dream attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and the suburbia. It proposes to transform vacant mcmansions, at the periphery of urban centres, into eco-water treatment machines, in which a micro-eco system of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify grey water from cities. Bigger wetlands will be formed around these bio-filter water treatment mansions to sustain larger fresh water animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.
Frog’s Dream envisions the idea to concentrate human population at efficient urban centres, and to return most of the suburban lands back to nature, except the peripheral zones outside the city, where former mcmansion neighborhoods were once located, to serve as manmade wetlands where human needs (water treatment) and the nature can co-exist.
2009/09/27
Calvin
Hong Kong, Toronto, Rome, Montreal, Beijing, London. Each city I stayed at shaped the person I become.
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