Architecture, Urbanism and Planning

Category: Works

  • 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.

  • Mao Shan Temple Masterplan

    Mao Shan Temple Masterplan

    Mao Shan Temple Masterplan from softgrid_limited on Vimeo.

    This is a short video describing our investigation attempting to integrate the formalistic relationships of the Forbidden City grid into a natural topography, which is the site of a new Taoist temple and masterplan. The investigation was inspired by an interview with the Taoist Abbot in which the shortest desrciption he provided of Taoism was ‘nature’. This brought up questions about the possible manifestations of the formal basis of the religion which is inherited from imperial associations (and historically intertwined with royal rites), when applied to a natural site such as this one.

  • Wan Shou Gong – Meditation Villa

    Wan Shou Gong – Meditation Villa

    Preliminary design for a meditation villa as part of the Wan Shou Gong Taoist Temple Masterplan Complex. The idealistic natural environment on this beautiful mountainside in China was both treated with respect (removable foundations and minimum direct contact with the ground) and taken advantage of to the full, with alternating circulation routes through and outwith (possible due to the fall on the site) the building, and inversions of openable sleeping spaces and subtle inner meditation sanctums.

    Produced in co-operation with:
    Laszlo Fecske – B-A-N-D
    www.b-a-n-d.net

    Marc Sawan
    www.eye-kon.com

  • Merit Award – Taiwan Tower Conceptual Design Competition

    Merit Award – Taiwan Tower Conceptual Design Competition

    Softgrid’s entry for the Taiwan Tower Conceptual Design Competition (SKY-MILL) received a Merit Award. We have added additional images of the competition to this post. Please click on an image to enlarge.

    Please see ‘Judging Results’ at:
    http://www.twtower.com.tw/index_e.asp

  • Allowing the Informal – Urban Block – 001

    Allowing the Informal – Urban Block – 001 from softgrid_limited on Vimeo.

    A study into how emergence can be allowed and partially directed within urban territories by understanding the underlying rules.
    Part of a series of urban models incorporating emergent behaviour by Eric Cheung while he was a student in Post-Graduate Unit 6 at the University of Nottingham.Please see the following link for more detail:
    http://designunit6.com/

    Student: Eric Cheung
    Research Leader: Ulysses Sengupta