Architecture, Urbanism and Planning

Author: Eric

  • Under the Railroad

    Under the Railroad


    Wading Through Light
    The intervention is designed as a soft space for new media exhibitions, where advances in projection technology have been utilised in combination with overlapping translucent curtains as screens for a layered and immersive illuminated environment. Advanced parametric computational geometries have been used to create a layout that controls several rotational projection points and their overlapping influences on the position and angle of each of the of hundreds of hung curtains, to create a complex geometric relationship, that will provide smooth and transient experiences between the various focal points.

    The Viewer Effects the Viewed
    The malady of much art today remains the separation of spectator from artwork, forcing both into passive relationships with each other. We propose a new space for art that challenges both the viewer and the art to exist interactively in the same space together, unavoidably influencing each other in terms of movement and perception. The public will have to wade through the curtained projection spaces, thus changing them, affecting them and becoming a part of them, while the art displayed and projected here can and should in itself become reactive to the possibilities of this unique space.

    Build-ability/Materials & Sustainability
    The lightweight structure and technology of concert stages has been utilised in order to allow easy decommissioning, reinstallation and reconfiguration, while creating a unique spatial experience with the use of easily available and renewable materials.

    Being Under the Railway
    The tectonics and materiality have been carefully designed to intensify the industrial and repetitive nature of the spatial quality of being under the railway, while also introducing a more ephemeral quality of experience the through re-interpretation, tactility, density and illumination.

  • Art Factory

    Art Factory

     
     

    Softgrid’s entry for the New Taipei City Museum of Art Competition

    WHAT IS ART today?
    An attempt to perfectly define a rapidly changing and continuously evolving form of human expression would of course be futile. However, this fundamentally difficult question lies at the very core of possibilities for a unique and successful new Museum of Art. Traditional (including ‘modern’ art) has its place as a series of transplantable objects that travel from country to country and museum to museum. While this system has many benefits, including cross cultural pollination and exchange of intellectual ideologies, one has increasingly become aware that it is possible to go and see the same exhibition in London and New York, as it is in Shanghai or Taipei. As a reaction to this homogenisation of the experience of Art, several artists from a new generation have started to work increasingly with two approaches that engage the specificity of space and place as the starting point to creating meaningful experiential situations.

    This engagement with place can be seen in some of the popular movements today including Digital Art, Installation Art and Temporal Art, where even the newer forms of networked artistic expression, often need a physical space in order to promote collective appreciation and physical engagement.

    IDENTITY, PLACE & SPECIFICITY
    With the rejection of the generic ‘art space’ designed simply to hold art, the proposal aims to provide a series of specific moments where art is CREATED, and created specifically to engage with the particular spaces provided. In order to create this possibility of artistic experience, it is the ARTISTS who MOVE from place to place and must engage with a series of tall, short, light, dark, strange and practical spaces designed into the museum, merging the ‘identity’ of the museum and the art together in an inseparable interweave. In order to experience art of this nature, no matter how temporal, PEOPLE MUST COME to the museum itself, rather than waiting for the exhibition to travel to their city.

    INVERTING THE PROGRAM
    The term “ART FACTORY” may beguile some, and yet is somehow appropriate in describing a place that is about production of specific situations and experiences rather than just display of moving exhibits. In order for the museum to truly engage visitors with art, it is also important to showcase parts of the process of making and allowing the public to engage with this behind the curtain viewpoint. In affect the program of display must be inverted in parts to become the program of creation. Where artists, live and work and become part of the exhibition itself.

  • SKY-MILL | Taiwan Tower Competition

    SKY-MILL | Taiwan Tower Competition

    In a climate of increasing environmental and social awareness, in a world where recognition of limited resources and unnecessary displays of political power and wealth are perceived as both wasteful and crass, the competition for a new landmark tower in Taiwan was an interesting brief. Our approach was to interrogate both the possible functionality and symbolism in a new tower, in an attempt to find positive interpretations for both.

    The design acts to stitch surrounding urban fabrics integrating civic landscapes, energy and production into a new form of landmark that creates spectacular views across the city of Taichung. An ephemeral silhuette is proposed that blurs form, material and environment while offering new possibilities for the creation of wind energy and crop production taking advantage of the verticality and height implicit in the  form.

    Team:
    Ulysses Sengupta
    Tom Lea
    Eric Cheung