From Points to Rooms
A new structural paradigm for a maker's community
Our projects explores the spatial implications and possibilities created by radical changes in the nature of production and the relationship between living and working. We propose a rethinking of the slab and column type into a room-based type as an alternate spatial and structural model for the new work-live model of housing.
With maker's movement, it becomes easier for people with ideas to bring them to productions with the help of rapid-prototyping tools, and sell them around the world with online retailers.
Place matters less in both production and distribution with the bottom-up entrepreneurship and distributed innovation. And yet the aggregation effect of people can shorten the value chain of the makers. What can bring the makers together would be an open-ended community, where living, working and leisure are all nested together in one structural and spatial arrangement.
2014
New Industrial Zone Urban Design , Singapore
We then developed four variations out of this concept of structure as rooms. The structure is acting as the spatial device to shape the volumetric space. From bottom to top, the structural cone transforms to define the space between room on each floor. We will use these four building types to form different types of urban room.
GSD Optional Studio:
The Factory and the City: Rethinking the industrial spaces of the developmental city
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Instructor:Christopher Lee
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Group Member: Shiqing Liu
Concept Diagram
The current production space is still dominated by the Domino House open-plan structural paradigm which was designed correspondingly to the nature of production mode of the time. With the new production mode, and the new living-working relationship, the space needed is reduced in size. Smaller units of lease with flexibility is favoured rather than the lease of large open plan.
The maker’s community then requires a new invention of room-based structural type, reduced to its bare minimum, but can induce maximum variety of occupation and events. The structure is inhabitable, transforming from points to rooms, or vice versa. One structural system can accommodate the diverse need of the maker industries without additional alter of space.
Living and Working, A Space All-in-one
For the entire process from design, prototyping to manufacturing
Interior Rendering of Work-live Space
Model 1:200
The Rules: Dominant Type A
Model 1:200
The Rules: Dominant Type B
Interior Rendering of Work-Pleasure Space
Out of the four, the two dominant types are constituted by live-work modules, which will construct the main grid of the entire community, we call them the rules. And the two others will serve as exceptions. The types of exceptions contain programs of shared facilities, amenities and shared manufacturing facilities.
The two dominant types both have a dual arrangement of co-living and co-working on the two sides. They will serve people who live and work here. The types of exceptions will serve both residents and visitors.The layout of the four types have is not to have separate buildings for living, working, and public program for pleasure. The arrangement of the plan seeks to program everything in life: living, working, pleasure in one system of space and structure.
This concept will also extends to the urban scale, when the types of urban rooms generated from the four types of architecture are also replicating on a larger territory to create the framework for innovation.
The two sides of the dominant types, co-living and co-working, will constitutes more private urban rooms and the more open ones. Among the more open urban rooms, the two exceptions positioned at the center will again define their characters, either as one with an amenity tower at the center, or one with an extended covered roof.
These four types of urban rooms then constitutes a series of urban experiences, moving alternatively in- between the enclosed, the covered, and the open urban rooms, with different lighting and different activities.
Overall, the types of architecture and the urban rooms are generated through an iterative process, in a way similar to the web architecture, generated by web codes. Each unit within the code follows relatively simple rules defined by code, but all of them together could perform very complex but united activities. There are no central organization or large companies with hundreds of employees, but all bottom-up entrepreneurs work and live in a distributed autonomic organization. The organization can extend to cover larger territory. We imagine that this can happen in a few decades, and we see the Singapore woodland site as an examplar of that future.
Axonometric Drawing
Plan