Archisteem 6: Friendly Architecture Curation - Village as Kitchen

kimzwarch (69)in #archisteem • 7 years ago

In this Archisteem series, I would like to curate projects around the world that are either smart, green, innovative or combined. Usually, I will spend some time browsing through architectural Instagram, Facebook, and website to get some daily inspiration and exposure to the projects around the world. This is to widen my knowledge of how buildings around the world look like and also to sharpen my taste as well, to design a more matured and aesthetic piece. With this, that makes me think might as well I share what I get to the community as well. Perhaps, that could become others’ inspiration too.

So, let me further elaborate the terms smart, green and innovative in order for the readers have a better understanding the scope that I mentioned.

Smart– technology oriented, whereby integration of different kind of techs whereby it focuses to make the building more energy efficient.
Green– environment oriented, it is more towards improving the ecology around the place by introducing nature back, especially in the urban context.
Innovative– people oriented, where we relate the building functions with the culture and economy of the local context, making sure that the projects are relevant to the local.

Although these 3 may not cover everything in architecture, these elements do play important roles to justify a resilient and good building.

Despite the 3 elements that I mentioned, the projects that I will be curating also possessed great aesthetic value that reflects that local culture and people lifestyle. That is the very essence of a successful and welcoming building. Besides being Instagrammable, people love the place because of its uniqueness in comparison with the surrounding buildings. However, the building should also be having some familiarity to the local to create the sense of hospitality. I think everyone should deserve a good and appealing living environment.

Now, let us go into today’s curated project: Village as Kitchen of UABB.

This project is led by the architects, Zhou Wei + Zhang Bin/ Atelier Z+ which took place in Dameisha Village, Yantian District, Shenzhen, China. The project covered 240m² and was completed last year.

The concept of this project was from the Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture in Shen Zhen whereby the place itself has become a unique place as a collective of villages have come together and formed a city. Thus, it is hard to differentiate whether it is a village or city. Physically speaking, we may see it as a village, but the culture and economy of the place have changed as Shenzhen is now one of the megacities in the world.

I always fascinated for the fusion of new element with the old element. That is probably my hometown, Penang has the same characteristic of such. The familiarity brings me to appreciate such gesture, about the adaptive reuse of the old buildings, rather than demolish and rebuild.

In this particular project, it is interesting to see how the architects identified the significant local culture which is the food and cooking of daily household and redefine spaces that could link with such culture. Rather than cooking in a private space, the architects encourage the local to have more open and public engaging cooking activities to promote more communication among the communities, regardless of local or foreign visitors.

The team also considered about the resiliency of the spaces, which is how long can the spaces stay relevant to the community. Can the new spaces blend into the community and become part of it? As an architect, it is the highest honor and satisfaction for me to see people enjoy the spaces that I created. If it improves and impacts the lifestyle of the community, it is even better!

Such project posed a lot of challenges as it involved many stakeholders. Therefore, it is important to have a firm and engaging team to make the project a reality. At the end of the day, it is more about toleration in terms of the pros and cons, short-term and long-term gain. From this project, we can see different interventions were made to the old buildings, which included an introduction of new functional spaces suitable for small events, garden, a more 3D and engaging layout, and a children friendly house. For a local to see such positive change and revamp of the old buildings, it will create a feeling of hope and joy. While for the outsiders, it will definitely raise the curiosity for the intention behind for such intervention. With these different emotional impact on the people (usually can be collected through post-construction feedback), the building has higher chance to blend in and become part of the community. This is the ultimate mission for the architect to achieve.