Dip Unit 20 Yr 4: Hong Tao Wei, Irene Siljama, Jun Shibata, Masaki Kakizoe, Kenny Tsui, Andreas Dopfer, Pouya Zamanpour, Tobias Klein, Ralf Eikelberg, Jackson Ka Hung, Vimal Mehta. Yr 5: James Pike, Nat Keast, Masashi Miyamoto, Stefanie Sujio, Shaun Siu Chong.
SKEENS Hybrids Between Skins and Screens Skins and screens are two of the most challenging, yet commonly used terms in architecture, perhaps because they stand for what is understood as the contemporary and where architecture is undergoing its deepest changes. However, as the result of objectifiable technological phenomena, they are also aesthetic and cultural clichés that risk reducing the architectural practice to an increasingly flat, topological-digital, and humandistant reality. Unit 20 propose SKEENS – a convergent and interactive process between skins and screens. Skins embody a wider understanding of walls and membranes in their quality as primary architectural conditions. Grounded in historical meaning as rigid boundaries, they become soft interfaces for social and physical interaction. These threedimensional skins imply a sense of depth and thickness that is created by a new materiality of inhabitable spaces. Although determined by the flat geometrical nature of digital interfaces, screens convey more intricate spatial attributes than simple line drawings, for they appear spatial in the manifestation of surfaces, volumes and shadows. As sites of convergence of different digital logics and interactions they create two-and-ahalf dimensional spaces – formulated circumstances, which require qualitative rather than quantitative data. The SKEENS were tested and informed by the cultural context of the People’s Republic of China, where the unit travelled between Beijing and Shanghai.
Marjan Colletti and Marcos Cruz
Clockwise from top left: Shaun Siu Chong, Shaun Siu Chong, James Pike, Andreas Dopfer, (group project) Kenny Tsui + Masaki Kakizoe, Stefanie Sujio,