Foreword_ZHAO

JIAJIE Jerry ZHAO

FOREWORD GSAPP

Typically, a foreword is the introduction to a book.

In this case, it becomes a book that symbolizes the upward moment in a trajectory of a lifelong endeavor. Foreword is the culmination of three semesters long collaborations at Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. It is the initiation of a series of unknown.

Table of Contents

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Airbeings Foster & Banks Openended-ness X-INFO Modeling A New American Index

HM:Tiantong Yuan is located 15 km north of Beijing and is home to some 700,000 thousand residents. Many of them young professionals who moved to Beijing looking for a brighter future. Since its development in 1998, tty has seen exponential growth not only in population but also extensions of its living quarters as well as basic infrastructure to fit the need of a large population. Yet, tty answers to another name of the “sleep city.”

Where a generation of floating population are housed under a large market of renter and leaser.

JZ: To understand the reasons that dynamized a generation of population we must consider some societal as well as economical changes that took place in the late 20th century China. The economic reform of the 1972 from a strictly planned social economy to a now “socialist market economy” as famously coined by Dengxiaoping had not only tremendous impact on the financial aspect of people’s lives but also shifted the definition of housing towards a commodity.

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The economic reform brought with it a fiscal decentralization, a tax reform. A system of tax distribution collective managed by the central government pushed local districts to lease out land as a source of revenue and compete with each other to attract population and thus more valuable land. At the same time, to prevent a rapidly densifying city center, the planning department established a series of regulations to push out population from city centers, drawing and creating a satellite ring around developing outskirts of Beijing.

HM: The dynamized populations, looking for best opportunities where it offers, is strictly controlled through a system of household registration. The Hukou system is made up of two parts, the status (wether urban or rural) and the location. As a method of effectively distributing wellfare and deliver resource, the centralized government has been applying the Hukou system to determine a resident’s eligibility to receive benefits, purchase housing or attend schools. So far it has been much more difficult to change the status of one’s hukou than their location.

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The result is the production of a “floating population” disentangled from the social, urban and environmental fabrics. The residence of tty is not only excluded from the competitive job market, much of the service a city like Beijing has to offer, but also denied a change, a chance in Hukou status that for many marks the true transition to being a Beijing citizen. Lets hear this from a recent floater who had experienced the reality first hand (VIDEO) Just as Wangshu had mentioned towards the end. We are now at an uncomfortable zone, globally, or locally. This is why, today, towards the end of 2020, Jerry and I would like to present an alternative social movement, a different choice. WE ARE THE AIR BEINGS

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JZ: As humans we breath in and out, constantly. Our transition at birth from a watery world into an airy world marks the constant exchange between us and the environment. The invisible bodies surroundings us is claimed ours momentarily only to be exhaled, ejected back to its larger whole. Recent crisis around the world, experienced simultaneously by different cities at different scales, have exposed, once again, not only our vulnerability but our peculiar ways of responding to events of emergencies. Just as Mandi mentioned earlier, we are now at the intersection of another cross road.With the power of choice, We found an opportunity to deliver power to the displaced in form of re-imagine, re-thinking and re-creating. Through reconstruction of the human body we launch out initiative of AIR-BEINGS. But let us first dive a bit into our anatomy.

The human respiratory system is composed of two parts, separated by the vocal cord. The upper tract, which are the nose, mouth and respective cavities holds the responsibility of filtering larger particles in air and the same time warming and humidifying the air that we inhale. The nasal cavities, specially, traps pollens, pollutants and release NO (Nitriade oxide), an important acting agent for our immune system.

Moving past the vocal cord we have the lower tract of the system consisting of trachea, which carries bodies of air through levels of separations of bronchioles and finally to their destination, the alveoli. The alveoli, with its number in the millions, are wrapped with blooded vessels from the circulatory system.

Working in tandem, the two systems exchange gas through the process of diffusion. Blood that is low in oxygen and high in CO2 is diffused with inhaled air that is high in oxygen and low in CO2.

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HM: Similarly, our planet diffuse carbon just on a much larger scale. The carbon cycle, composing of five major carbon pools (including the atmospheric pool which we breath under) is critical at taking care of the planet and tipping back the scale of balance disturbed by the anthropogenic emissions.

So far the Ocean and the biotic pool through photosynthesis accounts for much of our imprudent actions. Our 7.0 pentagram of emission carbon are being absorbed largely by these pools.

The diffusion process, or I should say the equalizing process, between us and the environment is the key to our “airbeings.” As a new type of organism we do not seek purification, but rather equalization. “Living with the problem” rather than “solving” the problem became a motto for our living. Through a series of self fabricated prosthetics, the new type of being is not only enabled, re-entangled, but also made visible the invisible bodies of air we are very much connected to.

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JZ:As AIR-BEINGS we refuse to work, or to comply with the kind of exploitation based society that ruined the world. We protest, and act, as a form of existing, and as a form of wonder.

The prosthetics we designed can be separated into two: the Air-dandies and the Noseyies. Departing from our base (at TTY) each day, the air-dandies travel around the city tracking pockets of air highly concentrated in CO2, NOx With our Direct Air Capture system, each of us collects and filter carbon particles from surrounding ambient air in an attempt to equalize the surrounding environment. We carry with us each a non-human partner, revitalizing a lost tradition in Beijing during the processes of previous removal. (Tradition of walking bird, 提笼架鸟, a flanuer) Each night we return to TTY from our day of wonder remove the helmet prosthetics. At night, while the collect carbon is under desorption for sequestration TTY, we transform into the “noseyies”. With a separate prothetic this time attached only to our noses, our new beings evolve by actively transforming their organic systems, first breathing consciously only through their nose.

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HM:Therefore we developed different types of prosthetics, those used outside of our HUB are for Carbon Capture while the ones used at their night of return is for the enjoyment and the benefit of ourselves. The NOSEIES, breathing only through our nose increase in oxygen absorption and higher level of natural NO released into the immune system. particularly noteworthy is the interaction among airbeings that is fostered through the nose attachments. With their mouth shut and their source of containmaintion to the environment consciously observed, the airbeings are allowed to touch each other, exchange comfort zones even under hostile condition such as COVID. Social distancing is no longer a physical effort but rather a collective understanding allowing for close contact between each individual.

Air, thus, connects us once again and entangles us with each other and the world.

JZ: OFTEN we organize CARBON Mob, where are larger amount of us collectively present ourselves as a silent form of protest through existing.

Of course, silently we would be also collecting vast amount of CO2 every second of our existence. That is how we live, we are the flanueurs of the anthropocene, we strive where toxicity is high, we are not afraid of it, we long for it, we are the lungs of the city.

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HM:Following a traditional Beijing Courtyard type. We transform the built environment through the following steps. Not in such order, and many times a simultaneous occurrence. 1. The return of the farmland 2.The DO IT YOURSELF 3.The center, then enclosure & the forest.

JZ:There are three ways which we plan to sequester the collected carbon.

Concentrated carbon are condensed into capsule forms. First being biomass sequestration through photosynethesis, as Mandy mentioned earlier absorbs 160 pentagram of carbon annually, secondly, the soil topology underneath our hub is claimable for pedological sequestration. Carbon stored in soil is not only efficient, convenient but also nutritiously to use as ground soil for our indoor farming plots. Lastly we plan to adopt a geological sequestration technique for all the left over carbon not yet sequestered. If deloped at a large scale geological sequestration posses the most potential all while unharmful to the environment.

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1.

As the founders of the Air Being initiative, we have brought our movement to California and Mandi to New York. Thank you for taking time to to witness the beginning of our movement, please follow us to join the next generation of Airbeings.

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2.

This is Jerry and Andy, today we are going to talk about envelope and structure. The first precedent is Lloyd’s of London. In this building, the main argument is about how architecture respond to the growing insurance market. The second precedent is the Hongkong Shanghai Bank by Norman foster, which Jerry will begin with first.

JZ:Nearly a century ago, architect GL Wilson while designing the Shanghai branch for the HSBC bank received the following message. “Spare no expense but dominate the bund.” A century later, the mission of the Hong Kong Shang Hai bank remained the same. [Fig.1] While is physical headquarter has recurred numerous times, it is now Foster who will take on the challenge to design the most exceeding tower for the most powerful banking organization with foreign interest in China.

In such sense, architecture seizes to be merely an object, building is now an open ended process. In all its glory the new Hongkong Shanghai bank is perhaps nothing more than a double of its predecessor by Palmer & Turner. Yet it is the very characteristic of being ahead of its time that identify both the old and the new as one. [Fig.2] Two key elements has so far dominated the building of towers in Hongkong: first, the ability to get maximum floorspace and second to build with remarkable speed. I would like to introduce a third element here, which is the nature of bank being an instable organization, one that is likely to expand. Together, these three elements led Foster to a courageous break through, pushing the structure and core to the permitter of the building.

Exiling the structure and core to its exterior is not without its constraints.

The steel structure, unlike concrete, is an unfamiliar material in Hong Kong to towers. The outcome is not only a bold stacking of five almost independent viereendale but also the development of a new fire proving method using a cementitious barrier coating. [Fig.3] The building of the tower, matched with the techniques of local constructions, is nothing short of being heroic. A building as ambitious and complex derived its envelope out of its structures.

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The cladding of the tower, as if sincerely recalling the earlier message of Wilson, is a 4.5 millions square meter contract, represented not only the largest cladding contract ever but also marking the envelope as one system, the “most expensive” of its time.

The Hong Kong Shang hai bank by Norman Foster, now 36 years of age, is in fact met with a sooner than expected fact of obsolesces. The Bank China down the road, a soaring tower by I.M Pei completed in 2001 swiftly ended the century long competition over the dominance of the bay.

[Fig.4] One is left wondering, what would have happen if Foster had not done his part? Who will take his place in 10, 20, 30, years to continue this process of “open work”? Here we have some of the proposal that were in close competition with Foster in the late 1970s. [Fig.5] AW: In the case of Lloyd’s building, services include the structural concrete frame, steel servant units, and cladding & glazing. You can see how every service elements has been banished, to leave the maximum space in plan, creating freedom and flexibility. [Fig.6] Structure frame is the key design to achieve this goal. Rogers introduced a prefab concrete frame system with waffle structure to expand the span.This system was meant to design in steel structure, but for reasons they had to change into concrete.

You can see how the detail had been designed in behavior of steel. Here is the steel servant space that become the most dramatic gesture of the building. Each servant space was designed in a delicate and honest way to express themselves. The pipes are exposed, the staircase has semicircle platform which is just the shape it needed. Rogers treated each part as if a robotic model, carefully putting them together and celebrate each part.

[Fig.7] The concrete frame and the steel pipe are blending each other.

The performance of elevator became part of the building appearance. The envelope also show how the lifting floor over the concrete waffle creates openness of the free plan, which hide the air conduct in the interior, expose to the exterior. This move provide the transparency to the interior.

The necessary maintenance and replacement of moving parts can then be accommodated without disruption to the daily use, Their positioning provides legibility and scale to the envelope. Lloyd’s building is balances technical efficiency with architectural expressiveness.

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* Jerry Zhao as Norman Foster while Andy Wen plays Richard Rogers.

[Fig.8]

[Fig.9]

[Fig.10]

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NF:“Richard, have you ever wondered, what have our buildings achieved?

For me I say they have achieved many things, our reliance control in swindon reinvented the typical factory floor, my airport in standsted revision the terminals. The HSBC bank I would say, reinvented the conventional tower structure.”

NF: “ we did so through challenging the past. For nearly half a century towers had evolved from the empire state to Mies’ typicality of a centralized structural core. We have now pushed it to its boundaries.”

RR: “By doing that, we not only free the plan, but also replace the centre space which was dark and occupy by the core, by Atrium, bring light to the building. ” RR: “However, we are not the first guys to have this idea. Wright’s Larkin Building in Buffalo pushes core to the corner, introducing the air conditioning. Gave us quite an impact.”

NF: “your Llyods’ building, is a brilliant extension of Kahn’s idea between the servant and the served spaces. The raised floor system could not have been used better.”

NF: “ in that sense, our work may be a continuum of a cyclical nature. It is one that contains a social dimension. Which each step we find ourselves progressing, at the frontier of our time, but in retrospect, it is nothing but traditional.”

NF: “ You know Richard, a scholar had once ask us to take a stance on technology, I found that surprising. Technology to me is nothing that we have discovered today. For me, I am more interested in making things.”

RR: “and this might explain why we deal the building core differently. To you, architect should take responsibility to design as a whole. You wrap each part in to the envelope. I expose them like what they are.”

NF: “and look at how different our building came out to be!”

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Fig. 6 #01_structure

Waffle

Service Towers : The service towers consist of pre-cast concrete members, each designed as a “kit.” Each tower to the main structure by a concrete connection floor.

Fig. 1

Arch 631

Fig. 3

Fig. 7

Larkin Building, Buffalo Frank Lloyd Wright, 1906

Fig. 8

Seagram Building, NYC Mies van der Rohe, 1958

HSBC Headquarters Foster + Partners, 1986

Lloyds Building 1978-8 Rich

Fig. 6

“Spare no expense but dominate the bund.”

Perspective by Cyril Fairey for Plamer and Turner.

Shanghai branch of the Hongkong Shanghai Banking Co. 1923

Fig. 9 Fig. 4

HSBC Headquarters, Foster + Partners, 1986

Lloyd’s of London, Richard Rogers Partnership, 1986

Fig. 10

Fig. 2

1 Queen’s Road Central, Hongkong

Fig. 5

Waldley House

1865

2nd Building

Palmer &Turner

1886

2rd Building

Palmer &Turner

1935

?

Norman Foster

1985

3.

Openend

dedness

Chp1: Demolished, but not gone

Hagi Civic Center

TL

TL

Kiyonori Kikutake

Chp2: Rear view mirrors

Hagi Civic Center Izumo Shrine Administration Office

Izumo Shrine Administration Office

MS

Toku’un-j

JZ

1968

1963

Toku’un-ji Temple

Sky House

FZ

Chp3: Times X2

TL

196

MS

JZ

How does one double something which no

e double something How doeswhich one double no longer something exist? which no longer exist?

OPEN-WORK as ...

ng as Doing Again, Doubling in Time as the Multiplication of Volume

MS

WORK as OpenOPEN-WORK Interpretation as Open Ended-ness

FZ

る は ︒ 義 層 空 す は 間

Chp3: Upscale

る 空 を ︒ 間 ⽴ を ち 定 上

TL

MS

JZ

18:18:57 From Timlok Li to Everyone : judas and the black messiah 18:21:40 From Timlok Li to Everyone : mank 18:31:07 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Round 01 18:31:48 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Timlok: Park Orients To 18:33:07 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 18:37:26 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Fengyi: Park Orients To vergence Idea 18:40:37 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Rejected 18:41:34 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Marcell: Fluid Interface 18:41:56 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 18:47:15 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Jerry: Road different M 18:50:23 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed *conditi 19:00:37 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Fengyi: Bridge 19:01:06 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:02:09 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Marcell: Connect Bridg 19:03:01 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:03:19 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Round 02 19:24:37 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Marcell: Timeline 19:25:00 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:30:52 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Fengyi: Gutter Repeated 19:31:04 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:34:28 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Jerry: Waterfall to oppo 19:34:38 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:42:35 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Timlok: Variation of tim 19:42:54 From Marcell Sandor to Everyone : Verdict: Passed 19:45:18 From Jerry Zhao to Everyone : Round 2 Complete. INTERM

Toward Middle

oward Middle (bottom site), mimics park behavior of the top. Con-

e of park and Underside

Material, and paths a second different material ional: only one added material for path

ge to the other end of site over rode

d, on bridge

osite lot, as the connector between lots.

meline

MISSION

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What if,

increased area of public spaces are fragmented and temporarily privatized through shrinking of the existing cities blocks?

X-Info Modeling

4.

What if,

enlarged public space and provided amenity programs are achieved through decreasing the transportation pressure?

What if,

multiple alternatives can be applied to a single block of the city to maximize efficiency and to reduce redundancy of data?

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What if,

techonology and big data bring not solution but rather more questions and uncertainties to our urban cities?

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Immaculate

5.

Particulates

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CDCR Staff: 10 Total number of inmates: 47 Total inmate capacity: 120

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65N

ear a year ago today, I sat in my bedroom in Los Angeles attending zoom sessions while red paints the sky and grey ashes fell. In less than a month, the Bobcat fire spread across over 110,000 acers, displacing population, and making visible our anthropogenic actions. Among the displaced were a particular group of individuals, inmates serving the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation at fire camps arvound the state. They account for an immense amount of men labor tackling wildfire each year, yet they operate in near suffocating conditions while the rest of Los Angeles hopes a return to cleaner air. The following map shows the controlled fire edge in relationship to the location of the fire camp. A direct contribution to these underpaid, heavily exploited labors.Domestically, The Bobcat of 2020 is the most recent fire that invaded into the domestic homes, while many property were threaten and evacuated residences around the san Gabriel valley found an near desperate reliance on portable purifiers as building HVAC system became tamed with ashes and carbon dioxides. Sales for indoor air purifiers skyrocketed within a week of the discovery of the BobCat fire. Yet How much does it really purify? Aside from reaffirming our inner need for purity. Finally, as Richard Feynman cleverly interlocks fire with other natural realms, the Bobcat not only made visible the air bodies around us. But also bodies of water, streams, lakes, watersheds. And of vegatation coverages, a carbon sequesters. Presenting in front of us the entangled reality between water, air, earthl. From the humans to the more than humans.

From birth we are transitioned from a watery world into an airy world.

We take for granted, from the moment of our first grasp, that our immediate to distanced air bodies are one of the most basic element natures has gifted us. However, since the industrial revolution, and since the beginning of our increased ability to irreversibly alter our environment, air has become a designed phenomenon. That is why today, the immaculate particulate is an attempt to uncover the hidden infrastructure within the United States that is constructing an idea of clean air, purified from any containments.

At the scale of our body, we must first understand how we ourselves filters air and more importantly expel unnecessary particulates. When air is entered into our lunges larger particales are captured by cilia on the walls of our trachea and carried upwards through mucus, those reaching further near our alveoli is caught by the macrophages and relayed back to cilias, a process which we yet understand. Institutional, there has been standards which aids us in this process of filtration. The CDC along with NIOSH together establishes test and standards that dominates many of N95 mask we wear today.Looking at the scale of the domestic, it would be almost impossible to ignore one of the biggest contributor to image of “clean air”. Dyson company in recent years has develop their own form of testing purification abilities through their own understanding of a domestic space, a vacuum shield of from any exterior connections, where toxicity is a as controlled as cleanliness. Further, through standards we begine to understand how building filters air in a mechanical way through the establishment of different MERV ratings. Shown here on the right.

As we move out to the larger scale of the urbanistic. We begin to look at how toxicity or pollutant are defined as well as were they are categorized. The environmental protection agency, although a huge contributor to the air that we breath today. Defines six criteria pollutant based on two standards, the primary and the secondary.

Through marking what is not “clean”, we inevtiablly instill an idea of purifying to our minds.Lastly, at the scale of the atmospheric we investigate the different systems and agencies that make up the network which monitors our atmosphere. How we choose to see and capture data effects deeply to our intimacy with air. Though institutions and its managerial infrastructure have deliberately attempted to separated air bodies into different sectors scales, we can see that inevitable that all these sections are transscalar and intertwined. No scale escapes the confines of other, borders of air become a construct.

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POLAR Test Chamber

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EXOCUBE – CubeSat

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Nephelometer

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AURA Satellite

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Gas Mask

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MERV 13 Filter

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Drip Torch

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Carbon Monoxide Detector

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FOREWORD

JZ HM AJ JC TT WX LW EW MS FZ TL AW BT MF

Columbia University GSAPP Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design Fall 2020-Summer 2021

Jiajie Jerry Zhao Man Hu Andrés Jaques Janice Yuan Chen Terry Ziang Tang Wu Xian Lucien Wilson Enrique Walker Marcell Sandor Fengyi Zhang Timlok Li Chia Jung Andy Wen Benard Tschumi Marco Ferrari