Desert City

Desert City is a prototype project of exploring a new relationship between people and public spaces in high-density cities. The goal is to introduce elements from nature, intergrade urban programs, and focused on the realisation of new public spaces in an urban context.

The chosen site in Shanghai is located in a cluster of residential towers and high traffic. At the beginning stage, a multi-agent system was developed to proceed with context data and accordingly determine the basic typology of the field. At this point, the project is identified as a combination of greenery, park area - and architecture.

In the architectural space, the project probed further in new typologies of post-pandemic public space - the relationship between intimacy and distance. The form was inspired by Claude Parent's Oblique Function that established a perspective of the human-architecture relationship on oblique surfaces.

Conventional building elements are discrete and reorganised precisely to offer a variety of human's physically experiences. The vague boundary, with implanted lightweight greenery, dissolves solid wall boundary between spaces. It let users climb up and down, sit and lay down on the body-oriented planes, which in a way, break the physical barriers while keeping the necessary functional independence.