Playful Objects, 2019
SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis
SCI-Arc Gehry Prize
Advisors: Hernan Diaz Alonso
Individual Work
This thesis explores what architecture and playfulness can do together. People tend to like things that allow them to play with and arouse their playful memories. Artists imbue playful culture, color, and personality into installations that change the way we experience the space and its context. By transforming familiar playful ready-made into something imprecise and formless, and recomposing them in a very precise way, we can create architecture with new aesthetics, having people to perceive it and want to behave playfully around it spontaneously.
In architecture, there has been a long discussion about manipulating familiar objects and defamiliarizing them at the same time to go from the literal to the abstract. However, when it comes to the composition, especially between different objects, it is not easy to escape from collaging. Getting inspiration from playful objects like toys or cartoon figures, this thesis will take a step further to focus on the transitions. The strategies of transitions include: fusing and smoothing the intersection and sharp edges; permeating the patterns from one object to another and from two-dimensional figures to three-dimensional shapes; and constructing simple, round-shape, toy-like joint connections.
To begin with, a formal toolkit is built up through manipulating online 3d print toys, taking out parts that have the quality of the original but not so recognizable. The first test is using these deformed objects to make abstract compositions.
Then, to examine and develop the methodology, these abstract playful shapes are used to remake canonical architecture projects within the same dimension and location, considering adding bold colors, plastic materiality, the possibility to be interactive, and most importantly, the precise transitions. The two remakes presented here are Ronchamp Chapel by Le Corbusier and Disney Concert Hall by Frank Gehry.
Ronchamp Chapel Remake
Disney Concert Hall Remake
The last test is trying to add more and more playful things into one to make a wonderful thing. And it is located in a conventional site to see what happens. The project is designed to be enjoyable, to reshape the context and to let people find their own way to play with architecture.
Full presentation video could be watched on My YouTube Channel.