Category: EXPERIENCE
Circular Kyoto – Flows
During the Atelier Huang Fall Semester 2022 students focused on a particular shokunin (artisan) and their craft, which ranged from kaiseki (seasonal, traditional cuisine), wagashi (Japanese confections), sake (Japanese alcohol), paper products (Karakami), kyo-shikki (lacquerware),to tatami and architectural parts. The analysis of the different flows undermining the making of the product, from material sourcing to (…)
Circular Kyoto
Atelier Huang Fall 2022 Since its glory days as the capital of Japan (794 AD), Kyoto has managed to cultivate a flourishing tradition of artisanship (Shokunin) for over 1200 years. Yet with the recent economic downturn and changing habits of a new generation, artisanship in Kyoto is facing a noticeable decline. In this experimental studio, (…)
Circular Gangbuk
Atelier Huang Spring 2022 The projects and architectural interventions of this studio focused on Sewoon Makercity, a strangely suspended, brutalist megastructure in Gangbuk, Seoul. We examined the potential of Sewoon as a catalyst for Gangbuk’s transition to a future, net zero circular economy. Historically, Sewoon has been going through several stages of development. On a (…)
Design Brain
Imagined as an ever-shifting spatial interface revealing the innermost dreams of an artificial machine pre-occupied by possible resilient futures of the Swiss refuge, “Design Brain” is a showcase of the outcome in the design research studio conducted at EPFL with master students in Spring 2020 called Refuge 2.0 – Artificial Swissness. In the studio, machine (…)
To Meditate – Virtual Zen Garden
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. In a global pandemic, various things can cause mental stress, anxiety and the (…)
Augmented Home
The recent outbreak of global pandemics has accelerated the virtualization of our everyday life and made humans realize how much they can do without leaving the confinements of their connected homes: participating in remote meetings, co-designing over distance, orchestrating a symphony over zoom, singing in a virtual choir, shopping for essentials and non-essentials, dancing and (…)
Swiss Materiality
In the experiments with GANs, implicitly pursuing Swissness as an aesthetic choice, this new alliance between humans and machines hint at the emergence of new architectural forms by merging contextual relevance and accidental novelty, and pointing towards a new definition of Swissness. GANs offer contextual roots by being able to learn from regional precedents and (…)
Refuge Sampling
Data curation and GAN manipulation (or equivalent deep learning network) is used to create variations of artificially generated alpine refuges with the quality of “Swissness”, where the collection of facades of Swiss alpine architecture will serve as samples for the algorithms to explore how architects can use and interact with machine learning algorithms as a creative (…)
Augmented Boutique
Augmented Boutique is part of a series of experimental projects in experience design conducted at the intersection of architecture and computer science (UE X). The aim is to examine the effects of digitalization on architectural typologies in contemporary cities. How do architectural and urban conceptions of space change with the infiltration of new elements of (…)
Haimian House 海綿家
Located in the Changshan Township, near Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province, the project is situated on a slope and touches the lake. The proposed architecture is a strong shape that anchors the habitant and the visitor to the shore of the Lake. It is reminiscent of a local, archaic and timeless architecture. Our ecological concept is (…)
Book Launch: The Noise Landscape
MxD is happy to host the Lausanne book launch for the new book ‘The Noise Landscape: A Spatial Exploration of Airports and Cities.’ Lab-member Peter Ortner contributed the chapter, ‘Metric as Mediator.’ Book description: Aircraft noise is perhaps the most debated impact of airport operation. It is heard over a large territory, across heterogeneous urban (…)
Lecture: Francis Jacquier
Francis Jacquier, principal at archiplein, joined us today to give a lecture on his experience running an upstart architecture firm in China. He also shared his deep knowledge of the architecture of rural Anhui province. archiplein is a young architecture group, composed of five partners: Marlène Leroux, Fang Weiyi, Francis Jacquier, Feng Yang and Wang Mingbo. (…)