Junya Ishigami aims for his KAIT Studio to behave not as a box but as an environment, and takes design inspirations from nature to do so, but his surveillance footage shows that the occupants eventually fell into a predictable circulation and the building essentially returns to its role as the container. This is because unlike an ecosystem where the “occupants” and the “architecture” mold each other, Ishigami’s building has a dominating influence on its mostly passive occupants. To allow the building to behave as intended by Ishigami’s original concept, I was charged to redesign the building’s intricate interior.
If one wants to design a morphing environment, then why keep to static representation? I propose that a dynamic—even biological—model can inspire a dynamic and biological building. I reconstructed Ishigami’s building as an ant farm, and studied the ants’ circulation as they tunneled through the sand. The acrylic model and its many columns influenced the ant’s excavation while the ants carved and designed their environment. The architecture changed every day.
Driven by the biological model and the ants’ evolving circulation, I determined that a permanent interactive fabric installation would give users the opportunity to shape their environment. Taking advantage of the 305 columns signature to the KAIT Studio, the fabric walls would be anchored to the pillars at varying heights. The building would influence the arrangement of these walls, but the inhabitants would ultimately choose the specific setup, which would then shape their circulation. In this way, the architecture and users would build a bidirectional ecosystem.
Designed by © 2014 Da Ying. All rights reserved.