Here are some quick reviews of my Princeton thesis physical model. Special thanks to Yu Cheng Koh, Li Xu and Yang Guang. Photos are taken by Li Xu and me.
上传一些普林毕设模型的照片, 特别感谢Yu Cheng, 李煦和杨光。照片由李煦和我拍摄。
photo by Li Xu
photo by Li Xu
photo by Ruan Hao
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I came across the video of our Velux Award two years ago on facebook today. Here is the link.
今天在facebook上看到以前Velux获奖的视频，就放上来了：
(This is work in progress, will have a final update in late January.)
Noise is dissonance in harmony which causes small differences that are at times more radical than big differences. It is typically resisted in the architectural representation of totalitarian powers in achieving the illusion of harmony. Nowhere is this resistance more evident than in China’s political plazas in which the dominance of power is achieved through its bigness and emptiness. However under the current condition which dissensus must be constantly released in dealing with the increasing hidden social agitation for the stable improvement of its society, the government is obliged to offer a new gesture of openness. Namely, noise needs to be introduced to form new type of totalitarian plaza as a hybridization of power and dissonance. Having the government as a client, the project is a new design experiment for the civic square in Shenzhen, a city next to Hong Kong and commissioned as the test bed for the country’s political reform. The in-between spatial co-occupancy is achieved through subtle perturbation of the original plaza which spatially triggers physical contacts and exchange of information at the micro scale, meanwhile maintains the totalitarian image and ceremonial programs at the macro scale.
Tags: Chinese Political Plazas, Princeton, Shenzhen Civic Square
即CA’ASI中国新锐建筑创作展巡回展览在2010威尼斯建筑艺术双年展开展之后，其北京展也于近日举行，人在美国所以未能前往。以下是一些威尼斯站和北京站的照片（大部分来自HDD_FUN.COM，表示感谢！）
After the road show of CA’ASI New Chinese Architecture Exhibition/ Award was held in Venice Biennale 2010, their Beijing exhibition was opened couple days ago. While I’m stuck in school, here are some shots in Venice and Beijing. Most photos are from HDD_FUN.com.
For more information, click here Press / News / Critique .
New Chinese Architecture Exhibition in Venice Biennale 2010 (威尼斯部分）
The analytical and computational Geometry of a house
Indexical Boxes, by Hao Ruan (Model by PSC)
The researches, either triggered or revisited the professional projects are aimed in answering the question, what remains in the era in which almost any free form could be easily designed via advanced computer modeling? “Indexical Boxes” reveals a sophisticated understanding of a simple geometry and more importantly the differences delivery out of different approaches.
It all started with the simple geometry problem: how to twist the top rectangle of a box so that its four vertex-connection with the bottom rectangle will be equal length and the two rectangles will be non-intersecting and nonparallel. This is a fundamental problem in understanding the nowadays seemingly easy and even banal “twisting” in design. However frequently, modelling software makes it too easy to generate complex surfaces without the understanding of its true geometries. This is not to agree with Bruce Mau’s “Don’t use software-everyone has it”, instead it is to claim that only by understanding the mechanism that drives the form finding, can designers reach beyond the specific limitation of software. This project is a parallel research and extension of the Ordos 100 house project. Three different approaches and their deficiencies were explored in answering and applying the aforementioned geometry problem. The first approach of analytic geometry precisely grasps the inner structure of this geometry but the process of generating alternation is time-consuming. The second approach applies CATIA’s spatial constrain and generates infinite solutions without legibility of the process. The third approach is a combination of the previous two that overcomes both deficiencies in creating an indexical geometric structure.
Tags: indexical geometry, ordos 100, PSC
Installation in 12th Venice Biennale, Winner of the Architecture Award. courtesy of Amateur Architecture Studio
*The following is some notes on the project I worked on this summer.
The most convincing way that this installation speaks for its name “Decay of a Dome” is to understand it as an as critical opposition to the authentic translation from drawing to buildings in Western architecture. This opposition is a collective building activity deeply rooted in the thousands years of Chinese architecture history, a way I would name as “many hands”.
Is the “Decay of a Dome” a hand production, or it is a handicraft? It is neither of the two. The way that this installation is constructed by over 10 people at the same time sets itself beyond the discussion of “Briocleur” and “Engineer”. Because it is not the choice of hands or any other tools that matters, rather it is the emerging collectiveness of hands, namely the activity of “many hands” that creates the new language.
Tags: Amateur Architecture Studio, Decay of a Dome, Tensegrity
Among the various types of people “meet” in architecture, encountering is the most fundamental and poetic one. Indeed, every deeper communication was initiated by such a moment in which chances are created for accidental and encountering. Human history itself was only composed by accidents, and particularly in city and its buildings, it is the placeness of such accidents that give narratives to physical objects and segments. Therefore the city and architecture shall be seen as a mechanism that creates countless possibilities of encountering. That is to say, it is not the movements that blesses architecture. It is the intersection of movements that defines its character.
However, the urban conditions in China under an extremely rapid development has going right to the opposite of making cities and buildings as a mechanism of encountering possibilities. Instead, the pursuing of efficiency as the casual and aftermath of its industrialization resulted in a status of inaccessibility to the real inhabitants. For the cities like Beijing and Shanghai, we see a repetition of Robert Moses, only with a much bigger price such as that over one thousand pedestrian die every day hitting by cars in cities in China. It is fair to say that the possibility of encountering is killed by its urban development and replaced with inaccessibility. As for architecture, most buildings ironically indicates a linear fashion of spatial organization, for which again the pursuing of total efficiency is blamed. Architects become the totalitarian’s executioner in designing linear circulation and minimizing the invincible trend of personalization in the age of information and overloaded information. The encountering and lingering spirit of gardens has rarely been revisit under the contemporary circumstances. Buildings remains a vernacular skin, without a vernacular vein.
Tags: Encountering, Venice Biennale
Animation for the Japan Studio in Princeton SoA last semester. It was done in half a day including learning Premiere. Will be better next time.
Oh, here is the introduction of this project. “Free Island” looks at the xenophobic phenomenon in Japan that the Japanese social structure has a strong resistance to foreigners. However the reality is a dramatically increasing population of foreigners immigrants as well as temporary business and tourism visitors coming to Japan. Particularly the permanent residents is the great contributor to Japan’s economy and its maintenance of population. The proposal to the contradiction of inevitability and the resistance is to create a buffering and transitional zone on the water that creates a double win situation for the Japanese who come mainly for leisure in this zone and the foreigners as a temporary stop before they are fully accepted by the Japanese society. The three major movements determines a superimposition of three grids. The first two are the movement of Japanese onto the island facilitated by the existing Aqualine connecting two sides of the bay and the connection between two airport in the sea. The third movement perpendicular to the other two is the routes of submersibles as the foreigner’s irreducible living unit out in the ocean. The mixed area in between the peripheral sub-docking islands and the central landscape consists of hotel, stadiums, opera house etc. and works as incentives for both the foreigners living under water and the Japanese living in the city to gather together.
Tags: Princeton, Tokyo Studio
AREA invited Preston Scott Cohen and I to do a dialogue on his projects in China. The article was recently published in AREA China 100+7. The bilingual text of the article is attached if you are interested, the images are at the end.
The Beauty of Constraints
A dialogue between Preston Scott Cohen and Ruan Hao
Profiles
Preston Scott Cohen
The architecture of Preston Scott Cohen is recognized for its innovative geometry and for its new approach to integrating buildings with their environments. Preston Scott Cohen, Inc. located in Cambridge, MA USA, is a full service firm with projects of diverse scales and types including houses, educational facilities, cultural institutions and urban designs for private owners, institutions, government agencies and corporations. Recent projects include theTel Aviv Museum of Art Amir Building in Israel, Datong City Library, Taiyuan Museum of Art, and the Nanjing Performing Arts Center.
Cohen is the Chair of the Department of Architecture and the Gerald M. McCue Professor of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Cohen has held faculty positions at Princeton University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Ohio State University. He was the Frank Gehry International Chair at the University of Toronto in 2004 and the Perloff Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. He is the author of Contested Symmetries (Princeton Architectural Press, 2001) and numerous theoretical and historical essays on architecture. His work has been widely published and exhibited and is in numerous collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard.
RUAN Hao
RUAN Hao is a candidate of Master of Architecture in Princeton University School of Architecture. He holds a B.Arch and M.Arch with distinction from Tsinghua University in Beijing and he was was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He worked in Preston Scott Cohen, inc. as the chief coordinator of the firm’s Chinese project and the principal design assistant for Taiyuan Museum of Art and Ordos 100 House. He has previously worked in several leading architecture firms including SHoP architects in New York and Fink + Jocher architects in Munich. He was an architecture correspondent of CCTV’s “Design for China” series and he writes for several leading architecture magazines in East Asia, including World Architecture, Time + Architecture and Art4D. He was honored as “Goldman Sachs Global Leaders” and “Asia Society Asia 21 Young Leaders” for his efforts in protecting cultural heritage of ethnic minority groups in western China.
Ruan Hao (RH for short in the following text): I would like to start by discussing your exploration of contemporary representation of vernacular Chinese architecture. Some contemporary Chinese architects have one way of such representation by reclaiming the design methodology is deeply rooted with the traditional Chinese culture. For example, some try to extract the fundamental relations of spatial elements in Chinese gardens and implement such relations into his contemporary representation. I see an exceptional and unique way of such representation in your practices in China, such as the Nanjing University Student Center. What interests me is that you are trying to create a localized language, local material etc. with a western or outsider’s perspective. This to me is a great challenge and I would like to know how you understand this project to that extent.
Preston Scott Cohen (PSC for short in the following text): It’s interesting to think about it as a vernacular condition, not only because of the exterior material finish, but at a deeper level, because of the cast in place concrete structure which was actually over-engineered. In order to save himself the time and trouble to calculate a complex structure to suit the geometry, the engineer introduced a great deal of redundancy in the structure which caused us to make even more interesting plans.
Tags: AREA
So I thought the first message should be something exciting… the construction site photos of the Taiyuan Museum of Art.
