Your brief is to create a city, a metropolis. This is, of course, an absurd task to try to tackle literally. Your project - your city - will be a creative and radical abstraction, a speculative imagining where certain conditions or situations are reinterpreted and amplified. Crucially, rather than taking a top-down approach to designing your city, you will create it from the inside out. You will let its form emerge through the act of combining custom parts which you will formulate. Consider your city as a condition which spreads out in all directions, an immersive environment without beginning or end. Your custom kit of design elements – the building blocks of your city – will emerge from your group's shared and individual investigations, interests, subjective experiences. Your city will ultimately take the form of a composite multimedia drawing, which you will collectively engineer, annotate, and imagine inhabiting.

Consider "the city" as an idea, a condition, as well as an actual place. It is shorthand for the domain where issues of space, society, technology, culture, and people intersect. It is multi-layered and fractal. There are many cities in one, literally and figuratively. It has multiple identities. It is a mess of extremes, contradictions, and improbable interactions. It is simultaneously organized and chaotic, repetitive and irregular. It's artificial, designed to control 'nature' and natural forces, yet environmental forces frequently encroach and disrupt its controlled spaces.

I am asked to plan to undertake and document three inspiration excursions, ideally one of which is IRL/physical.

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Excursion 1:

‍ I attended a hearing that tenants complained about too narrow spacing between existing and constructing units, that they cannot get enough sunlight. Then I looked for more clues about Sunshine. I found people under umbrella, cars being shaded, a tree wall, a solar water heater on the roof, people using the common area to dry.

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Excursion 2:

‍ I found a reconstruction plan for a plot to make the old aparts more beautiful, but when I walked into the plot, I found that only buildings in the first row facing the street is repainted. Because of the concept of administrative zoning in this neighborhood, people who live in it can go to very good schools. Many stores started their house agency business.

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Excursion 3:

‍ When I walked into this old plot, I found many gardens. Gardens on the roof, gardens on the ground, gardens that were raised in the air. I found a covid testing sites underground in flower pots. I found the luxury cars in this old plot. Again, because of the administrative zoning, so even though it is run down, it is very expensive.

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Extracting repetitive elements from the three excursions and composing kits

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Different kinds of sunlight

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How Fengshui influences

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New and old shifting physically and virtually

Create three contrasting 'imaginary city' drawings which utilize the kits/collections.

Each drawing is a representation of an "idea world", an entire world where everything in it, and everything that happens in it, relates to one idea. These city drawings are studies. They will be abstractions. They will likely not look like familiar cities. They are, however, a space for us to think about "what is a city?"

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City 1: City of Jellyfish
The combination of my sunlight kit and Alan Amaya's stair kit, with translucent jellyfish as the carrier, the more upper level residents living in the house can enjoy more controllable sunlight, the lower level residents gradually lose the right to shade.

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CIty 2: City of Absorbing

On top of the concept of Feng Shui, a city of constant change is conceived. If Feng Shui is about people changing their surroundings to change their destiny, what if the environment changes on its own when people move? This is a city that flows all the time, and I tried to show it with flowing colors, and the colored parts are changing.

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City 3: City of Where would we go now?‍

The shifting kits are combined with Zeyu's tombstone kits to consider the different definitions of the world after death. Where will we go after death?

Choose one of the work and expand the depth, scale, scope and canvas size of your chosendrawing. Imagine that my drawing will be printed big – taking up the size of awall. Make an abstract spatial plan, and evoke ideas about how the urban fabric is organized. It is a drawing which is epic, but also intimate; a drawing whichevokes an intense mass of structure and activity when viewed at a distance, but which also invites the viewer to look close, and explore details, moments, interactions.

Concept Develop

City of Absorbing

What is behind the city that moves automatically? Why could the surrounding move? I try to visualize the workers and machines that have been invisibilized in the concept. Around the pedestrians, Feng Shui masters, workers and large machines appear as a group, working together to accomplish the movement of the city.

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Create a composite city.

The Eye of Providence City, named after the "All-Seeing Eye of God,” to symbolize a benevolent order. In a city made up of old transport vehicles called buses. In the cities made up of old transport vehicles called buses, the inhabitants, considered workers, live in the lower floors, where people are always under surveillance by all seeing machines. The all seeing machines are not allowed in the upper half of the buses because residents who live closer to the "Great Architect Of the Universe" are least likely to commit crimes...so they say.

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A great designer, walking in the city gazed by the all seeing eye.

The great designer accidentally gets lost in the bus jungle and she is targeted by the all seeing eye. The residents who have long since become familiar with everything are watching her through the windows of the bus.

On the edge of the city, workers are constantly transporting garbage away.