Walking on Losing and Finding
Xin Yu
As Tschumi said, “Form follows fiction.” Based on the theories of deconstructivism and postmodernism, I try to imagine the stories of the building’s users in order to inform the design process. “Story” is a kind of script that tells me what happens in the spaces I am designing. Relationships between spaces, the needs of the inhabitants, and the emotions that are being evoked by the space are all taken into consideration to create a new approach to architecture.
Spatial Disorientation and socio-spatial segregation are two major problems my site which is one example of the failures of utopia architecture. It is like an inward-looking model, and this radical “emancipation from the ground” residualized the urban street. The users’ relationship to the urban street ever more remote. The area full of dullness, just like the dead-end around the walkways that can be seen everywhere.
This is not fiction in the sense of made-up falsehoods, but fiction as a story. I endeavour to tell the people’s story – past, present, or future. The building may tell a story about its inhabitants through its spaces. Relationships that are important become obvious. I use a series of theme illustrations to show people who facing disorientation in different dimensions. My spatial experiment began exploring spaces and volumes. The style was characterized by a loss of symmetry or continuity. Design rules were broken and “form follows function” was neglected. The whole playground is divided into four main parts, Lost Square, Explorer Garden, Adventure Maze, Gaze Station, but there are no boundaries between them, instead, transition freely. When people walking on different positions, the ground will present different landscapes, bringing illusions of different depths.
The whole narrative space aims to perplex the visitor, making the stay in their space an experience worth remembering, and the interior is as much as mesmerizing as the exterior in most cases, even more wondrous in some. The fragmented parts of objects, distorted walls, bending roofs, swirling passages and oddly shaped interiors in this disorentiational ground are even meant to create a feeling of discomfort or confusion. The hallmark of the playground is its apparent instability. Though structurally sound, this part seems to be in states of explosion or collapse. As a kind of deconstructivism architecture, however, is not an architecture of decay or demolition. On the contrary, it gains all of its force by challenging the very values of harmony, unity, and stability. I am calling for us to recognize in both what disorientation can do, and what we can do with it, but also, eventually, in what it can allow us to do with it, which is to say in the ways that experiences of disorientation can help us and others face and benefit from further disorientations in the future.
My claim is not that we should create or encourage more physical disorientation. On the contrary, it treats the confusions we often face as unified and harmful and ignores the many ways in which they may continue to help us develop our abilities. The “surprising momentum” that sometimes appears when disoriented is usually caused by our physical experience being more open, flexible, or connected to people than previously thought. Although chaotic implementations are not always helpful, disorientation is not always harmful- disorientations are most promising when they not only jostle, but also propel.
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