Year 1 Architectural Design Studio
Studio Haotian Zhang + Hae Jin Lee (TA)
All at once
F/W 2022
Department of Architecture
The University of Hong Kong
The instant, the repetitive, and the slow in the city
All at once: The instant, the repetitive, and the slow in the city
Dynamic City
In Borges’s story, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, people of the imaginary land, Tlön, hold a unique worldview, in which they see phenomena instead of solid material beings. They are therefore gifted with the wisdom to see the world as dynamics rather than static constructs. Similarly, this studio regards the city as a place in flux. We study how it breathes, grows, and is animated by its inhabitants: light, wind, water… and people. The events may be incidental, repetitive, or too slow to be perceptible. The city is ever fluctuating, and the studio sees it as our goal to understand how the changes happen to be able to accommodate them in the design. Yet this semester, before designing anything, let’s see the city first.
Seeing Time
The image above is a project by Tehching Hsieh in which he punched a time clock every hour on the hour from April 11, 1980 at 7 pm to April 11, 1981 at 6 pm and took a photo of himself. The work is a conceptual reference for the studio because it shows with considerable disturbance that time cannot be seen without effort. Time often slips the mind of those who undergo it, but can be seen when it is re-presented. Drawing, modeling, and filming are the tools students use to capture and represent time in the city for it to be paraphrased and reinterpreted in the space of the studio.
Shadow Play
The studio takes shadow as a tangible subject to study. Besides being an evidence of time, shadow is both spatial and material. It defines a momentary volume behind the light that accommodates the vibrant city life. It also transcribes temperature, humidity, and turbidity into its texture. The studio does not study the events directly, but their shadows on the city -- their imprints on the canvas and the space between the two. It is also worth mentioning that the studio does not focus on human characters in the city but instead the changes that happen to the city itself.
Studio Instructor Haotian Zhang Teaching Assistant Hae Jin Lee
