The Floating City

A corner of downtown: selfsufficient community

Individual Graduate Academic Project

Course Name: Foundation studio III

ARCH 7010

2021-2022 Fall semester

Instructor: Esther Lorenz

E-mail: el9q@virginia.edu

Design Concept:

This design is aiming at creating a residential community with human touch in Manhattan, New York. The unique point of this project is to start with a small scale spatial experiment in regards to several aspects such as human body scale, enclosure degree, human senses. Intimate and private space are compared through the experiment. Human feelings were taken into careful consideration from the preliminary experiments to the overall community design.

Looking at the site at a little corner of Manhattan area, crowded traffic and a sudden stop at the shore makes this site seem apart from the city. Instead of trying to engage the site into the city texture, I consider the feeling of apart as a special characteristic of this site, especially in a busy city like Manhattan city, I want to create a space that people who live here feel they are temporary away from the hustle and bustle of the city and regain comfort from the community.

Think about the body

Starting from the layout of furniture, I notice the sequence of human body movement. When people walking through the space, body can feel the different distance between object. To scale a little bit to look at the enclosure wall, it may cause different feeling when a body faces wall and back against wall. How does this feeling be aware by human body? I would like to call it “AURA”. It is a energy field around human body, and it needs to some space to contain it, so when body get close to some object, the AURA will have a contact with the object, then this touch cause the feeling.

Therefore, in this preliminary spatial experiment, I want to study the degree of enclosure, to what degree a body may need to maintain intimacy and to what degree body feel open and comfortable. Meanwhile, using this degree to make space.

Strategies to Site

The site of this project is a relatively small area near Rockefeller University, NY. Surrounded by high-rise buildings and at a crowded crossroads, the site is scattered, and residential quality is not guaranteed. However, that can not be ignored is the best view obtained from a riverside location without any building in front of it. The initiate idea is to connect the scattered site to make it accessible to the river view as well as update the quality of this live environment. I ended up with an idea to make the building floating on top of the area. The strategy is under the idea to strengthen a self-sufficient community so as to apart residents who live here from an apparently worse existing condition. Iterations show several attempt out of taking different aspect into consideration.

Partition wall

The idea of balance of privacy and intimacy is applied through the unit plan design. streamline into a unit to reflect the transition from public to private. In sections, a height

wall and Height

design. In plans, programs required by a typical residential unit are organized by the height difference of partition walls are aligned with different programs characteristics.

Building Bricks Games

A kindergarten where children can play and learn

Individual Undergraduate Academic Work

Course Name: Architectural design 2 (NO. 13475175) 2017-2018 winter semester

Instructor: Li Ling

Tel: +86 136 1180 8971

DESIGN CONCEPT:

Children are the future, these days we pay more and more attention on what kind of educational mode is suitable for children. And we find that nowadays children’s education is not only learning from the classroom, moreover, based on various personalities. Children’s way to learn knowledge vary a lot from one and another.

Some children are active, so they would like to explore the world by themselves, while some may be introverted that a quiet self learning space is a better choice. So in this design, I would like to use the concept "Building Bricks" to build a kindergarten which is suitable for different kinds of children.

Background

The location of this site is LongTeng road, Songjiang district, Shanghai, China. Actually, it is in the suburbs and far away from the central city. So I think it is a good place for a kindergarten to test the relationship between architectural space design and some new teaching and learning modes.

Concept

The concept originate from “Building Bricks” which is an normal toy for kids. To scale them up, they can become the shape of buildings or furniture in these spaces. But another interesting feature of these building bricks is that they can move.

What Are Moveable? Not only the furniture or little structures can move, but most importantly, children are “moveable”, or, restless. So in this design, I discuss how to use kids’ nature to help them learn more and freely.

Site

The given site was located on an incult grass slope with 3 meters height difference in the city suburb.

Add Functions

Then, I placed different functions in this site. I chose different types of blocks depending on different usage.

Strategy

I slowly lowered down the elevation of the curbside so as to make an entrance in accordance with the norms as well as to suit the height difference.

The Joint

Considering the lack of space for placing the runway, I directly used the runway as a joint to connect each blocks.

Sleeping on the slope

Several smaller blocks were separated from the bigger ones, then they were put in the middle space to become children’s bedrooms.

Develop more Details

Taking the actual needs into consider, more detail treatments like how to link up the runway and building blocks were done.