Prefabricate Art

Kaizhou New City Young Architects Competition

Site: Kaizhou, Sichuan

Team: Wenqi Yang, Eva Wei

Type: Installation

Kaizhou new city is very different from the traditional western urban design approach. Implementing the idea of building city in the park, its developable lands are scattered across the park. An irrigation canal built back in the 1970s cuts through the park from west to east, becoming the most compelling feature of the site meanwhile representing the collective memories of hard-working in that era.

This design originates from the arched structure of the aqueducts. By deconstructing and reorganizing it, we hope to create architecture that share the same symbol with the aqueducts while being different from them. Meanwhile, inspired by Parc de la Villette designed by Bernard Tschumi, we intend to create serials of similar but different architecture across the park, and have them linked together by an implicit trajectory, such the explicit trajectory of the irrigation canal could intertwine with the implicit trajectory of the architecture, trigging the conversation between the old aqueducts and the new architecture.

Several events are conceived in the park, including but not limited to relaxation, reading, exhibition, performance, sports and creative market. In the meantime, we deconstructed the elevation of the aqueduct, and boke, extended or scaled its arches, in hope of finding the relationship between the arch space of different orientations and scales and multiple events, thus the relationship became the basis of the following design.

Facing the rising trend of pre-fabricated architecture, pre-fabricated architecture is still stereotyped as rigid and boring. Based on the aesthetic feature of architecture, we emphasized on the topic of whether art could be pre-fabricated. We reorganized the symbals of the aqueducts into four cubic modules and made them related both from outside and insideļ¼Œ thus the combination of different modules becomes possible.