URBAN ARCHIPELAGO

BODY AND LANDSCAPE AS WAYS OF SEEING

URBAN ARCHIPELAGO

talk by Eric Chen / ArchiBlur Lab

Eric Chen is an architect from Taiwan. He believes architecture should not be confined into just buildings, as architecture to him is more than just a building rooted to one place from the day it was erected. He constantly travels to other country in search of locations for his next project. His projects are experiments of elements of architecture in many different variations and interpretations.

He first founded ArchiBlur Lab as an architecture studio that is primarily utilised for both fulfilling and realizing the founders’ aspirations to define architecture in a different light.

The development of modern architecture stresses the eternal pursuit for systematic efficiency, visual superiority, and natural boundaries. However, often because of the inability to resist time, the roof collapses and the stairwell shows non-geometric discontinuity, leaving walls with longer substantive temporality, or even a complete openness in the end. For buildings, this is a formal destruction and dissipation of bodily constraints, as animal nomadism and plant parasitism become the context of masters to the house. This natural transference leads to a disordered time and space. Dissipation of function causes the original space to lose directionality. The non-systematic dilapidation of the roof leads to local plant growth and a place full of vitality.

This seems to be the time for them research and reflect on what exactly a building is. The creative context of ArchiBlur Lab is in the micro-relationships causing destruction and landscapes they formed, to reconstruct the terms of architecture. Returning to the state before formation of architecture, through the repetitive intervention and formation of physicality, it also considers the possibility of destruction, so that another interface, the conversion of materials, the errors in connective points, and the location of the body, etc.

We first dwell into his prime work in ArchiBlur Lab, the Urban Archipelago. He first coined the term Urban Archipelago as the summation of urbanization and plateau, where urbanization represents the process of population shift from rural areas to urban areas and plateau as the place and location in question. Therefore Urban Archipelago aptly represents the vision of Eric’s aspirations.

He vows to remove architecture from the confined theory of rooted architecture and plans defy the norms to the very definition of architecture. His first thought was to mobilize architecture, to bring an architecture that could travel away from its original intended point of location. Throughout the years there have been many different variations of “Urban Archipelago”.

The first step to allocate an Urban Archipelago is “Collecting” : Body and Landscape as ways of seeing. It revolves around the renewal of relationship connecting the body on the site and construction, while also redefining the relationship between urban and village.

The said Archipelago are drifting platforms in the photos above. They are able to fill urban spaces. It can transform itself, and therefore the landscape, body and the city in turn can be changed as well. An urban space, void and area taken up by the Urban Archipelago can be transformed into a stage, a theatre, a classroom. This in turn enables the study of the interactions of people and the morphing urban space.

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The second topic discussed was “Reworking Archives” : Dynamic Landscapes. As stated in the name itself, it is the distance and engagement of archives. The reorganization of archives, oral interviews, writing, material, research, old photo restoration, documentary, community context and landscape survey is all taken into one process of consideration and design expression. The result of the collective process above shows the collection of context and reveals the visible and invisible.

The first project in this category is to enable expression and result of landscape survey and historical development of the site shown through multi level exhibition style.

The second utilizes cloth and strings to recreate a landscape through suspension of strings. With red suspended pendulums indicating site sections.

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This talk reintroduces Architecture to us as architecture student, teaching us to not only conceive architecture as it is, but what you can perceive from the already available knowledge that has been found. I would say this is an eye-opener and worthy of a talk that should be experienced by every architecture student.