Construction in progress

Architectural Design Firm: ARCHIS Design Studio

Founder and Principal Architectural Designer: Shining (Christina) Sun

Project Location: Ningbo, China

Project Duration: 2020-2023

Building Area: 80,000 square meters

Design Team

Lead Design Team: Shining (Christina) Sun, Zirui (Allen) Pang, Yotam Ben-Hur, Yuzhou Peng, Yiqing Wu

Design Team: Xu (Jerry) Lu, Yalun Li, Guangwei Ren, Liding Fan, Xinyao (Christine) Xiao

Collaboration: Zhejiang Xinjie Construction Co., Ltd.(Hao Zhang, Liangjun Chen, Ming Luo, Yifei Pan, Xin Luo, Tianqian Zhu, Huili Liang, Linghang Li, Yuanwang Zhu)

Interior Design:

Supercloud Studio：Xu Xunjun,Gan Ruobei,Zhang Zhibin,You You,Xue Meng,Yang Yuqing

Kangyi Shen Studio： (Kangyi Shen, Zhuozhi Xiong, Jin Zeng), Wei Chen, Liyuan He

Landscape Design: Feng Liu, Sheng Cao

Facade Consultant: Chuanxing Jiang, Jun Wang

Lighting Design Consultant: Lei Pang

Signage Design: SURE Design

Photography: Xiazhi、Runzi Zhu

Ningbo Gulin Vocational High School is a new campus that accommodates 3,000 students distributed across 75 classes, spanning four specialized departments: preschool education, culinary arts, arts and crafts, and e-commerce. Situated in Ningbo's Haishu District, China, the project encompasses two distinct plots, with a combined land area of approximately 96,851 square meters.

The main challenges of designing a vocational school in comparison to typical high schools are the substantial number of training rooms that must be included in addition to standard classrooms. This factor necessitated the design of efficient horizontal and vertical circulation to facilitate the intense traffic between various functional zones in the school. Diverging from the isolated units in typically centralized layouts prevalent in traditional pedagogical models, the design’s mat building typology establishes continuous interior pathways linking diverse departments, informal learning spaces across various campus levels, and adaptable modular layouts capable of accommodating future needs. Using a non-orthogonal grid system and a series of connected courtyards for the educational buildings, the design interlinks the four specialized departments to promote cross-disciplinary interactions. While the residential zone and educational zone are connected by the public loop library, auditorium, and dining hall, the active sports facilities are placed on the southern plot to allow a separation of noises between the learning + living zone and the active sports zone.

The façade design gives the campus a cohesively uniform visual identity with local variations between buildings. The undulating GRC panels of the departmental buildings and perforated aluminum panels of the auditorium are grouped parametrically to create dynamic facades under different lighting conditions. Each departmental building’s courtyard is defined by its unique flooring, colour palettes, material choices, vertical design elements and spatial forms. These elements serve as visual markers and contribute to distinct place-making spatial experiences, helping students find their way around the campus without falling into a monotonous routine. Additionally, the school’s internal courtyards, reflecting pools, urban farming, and green roofs integrate with the lush greenery surrounding the site, allowing the student community to learn in nature.

As school offers a multitude of daily experiences beyond classrooms, this project conceives the campus as an open city that enables multiple narrative inputs from the users. Students are the directors of their own daily encounters and plot developments, devising their own narratives through choosing different paths to take on campus. Instead of creating a preconceived coherence, the design aims to stimulate the improvisational, the uncertain, and the multiplicity of meanings in building experience through the students’ daily practices of space.

Lead Team: Xu Bing, Feng Yan, Zhang Wenchao, Sun Shining

Medium: Artificial intelligence generated film with variable duration

Time Length: Variable duration

Exhibition: The 5th Pingyao Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon International Film Festival, 2021 Museum of Art Pudong, 2021-2022

https://www.xubing.com/en/work/details/690?classID=8&type=class#690

This project works closely with artificial intelligence scientists to develop a real-time feature film production artificial intelligence system that involves no human production personnel (directors, screenwriters, photographers, or actors, etc.). In this interactive exhibit, the audience can input their preferred film genre (such as science fiction, crime, romance, etc.) and customize the narrative plot or style of the movie by entering keywords or sentences, resulting in a unique AI-generated movie. This project aims to pursue an element that transcends human creation and fulfills a demand that is absent in traditional film. Its concept emerges from human biases, including narrow emotional perspectives, political and economic interests that breed greed and immorality, as well as limitations in knowledge that impose restrictions. AI suggests the “internal structure” of human life by accumulating various human image materials from a neutral standpoint. This project is largely an experiment of the future possibilities of AI film.

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/823196158?share=copy 

"Every story is a travel story - a spatial practice.

Space is a practiced place".

-- Michel de Certeau

Construction Photography (Runzi)

Modern-day skyscrapers are characterized by monotonous uniformity in architectural language regardless of the programs they contain. The aim of this project is to move from uniformity to heterogeneity by expressing the character of skyscrapers through their programmatic, formal, and scalar differences in architecture.

Responding to the objective of rethinking a humanist skyscraper city, our tower creates a hierarchy of open green spaces at ground level and in the sky—with varying degrees of publicness. The multi-leveled open green spaces combat the typical segregated living experience found in high-density housing, and aim to encourage communal interactions between different tenants.

The skybridge acts as an organizational device where the upper residential tower meets with the lower office tower, mediating the sectional and scalar differences of the two typologies. Contrasting in their formal language, the generic office plates are characterized by stacked horizontality while the radical residential modules are dominated by systematic aggregation. The residences are divided into smaller scale clusters, each constituting eight floors of various unit types.

Ultimately, the residential tower finds reciprocity between autonomy at the module scale and collectiveness at the group scale. As the tallest skyscraper in the master plan, the building employs strategic orientation and carving of voids to maximize unobstructed views towards the urban island and Lake Michigan in the east. Responding to urban design guidelines, the building also activates the edges of the site and creates continuity in ground-level circulation.

Collaborator: Zirui Pang

Re-thinking Humanistic Skyscrapers

Modern-day skyscrapers are characterized by monotonous uniformity in architectural language regardless of the programs they contain. The aim of this project is to move from uniformity to heterogeneity by expressing the character of skyscrapers through their programmatic, formal, and scalar differences in architecture.

Responding to the objective of the studio to rethink a humanist skyscraper city, our tower creates a hierarchy of open green spaces at ground level and in the sky—with varying degrees of publicness. The multi-leveled open green spaces combat the typical segregated living experience found in high-density housing, and aim to encourage communal interactions between different tenants.

The skybridge acts as an organizational device where the upper residential tower meets with the lower office tower, mediating the sectional and scalar differences of the two typologies. Contrasting in their formal language, the generic office plates are characterized by stacked horizontality while the radical residential modules are dominated by systematic aggregation. The residences are divided into smaller scale clusters, each constituting eight floors of various unit types.

Ultimately, the residential tower finds reciprocity between autonomy at the module scale and collectiveness at the group scale. As the tallest skyscraper in the master plan, the building employs strategic orientation and carving of voids to maximize unobstructed views towards the urban island and Lake Michigan in the east. Responding to urban design guidelines, the building also activates the edges of the site and creates continuity in ground-level circulation.

Collaborator: Zirui Pang

Mat Urbanism

While tower has become the defining typology in contemporary China's urbanized cityscape, this project focuses on developing a distinct mat fabric as an alternative experimental urban morphology. Negotiating between scales of architecture, landscape, and infrastructure, the project is a close-knit, mixed-use, multi-level mat fabric that encourages diverse communal living experiences and social encounters through creating various public spaces. The system plays with transforming the relationship between solid (Part A) and void (Part B) using the Gestalt principles to create diverse interior and exterior conditions around mutating typologies. Part A bias a more introverted public space and internalized circulation system; part B bias a more public and open mode of housing system. Part A and part B are subdivided and combined to produce various possible iterations. The different typologies aggregate to produce interconnected, mixed-use clusters. The large range of possible new typologies created by the system invents new ways of living and inhabiting the public spaces. Through exploring new modes of living created by new urban morphologies, the project aims to revitalize urban relationships and adjacencies in a way that is absent in the current tower dominated landscapes of China.

Robotic Fabrication & Weird Tectonics

Collaborator: Yue Gu

Date: 2016

The evolution of digital fabrication technologies and advances in computation have redefined the relationship between design and construction and prompted new understandings in material intelligence. Our investigation focuses on the material and morphological principles of sea glass sponge as a biological model. The morphology of Euplectella aspergillum utilizes non-linear operation of swarm systems and multi­agent behavior. Hierarchies in the system emerge from these non-linear interaction as variation in fibrous intensity and density. In parallel with the bottom-up design research, we have developed an innovative robotic fabrication process that simultaneously weaves and reinforces fiber thread to create lightweight and liberated structures. The system operates at various scales to produce various architectural elements, from screens, envelopes, columns, walls, to sky bridges. At an architectural scale, we envision this system to grow into a series of sky bridges in New York City, connecting existing buildings and activating un-used public spaces. Ultimately, Fiberscape provides a new paradigm in architectural construction, where the skin, structure, and space are made from the same relationships and material.

Soundscape offers new ways to experience and perceive the spatio-temporal dimension of the city through its acoustic properties. In contrast to a static representational model of the city, the Participatory Soundscape model allows people to identify, evaluate, and experience the soundscape of the city through real-time interactivity, offering the potential for citizen participation in urban sensing and planning. Through mapping the perceived sound amplitudes/frequencies with human paths and the magnitude of human activities in the context of Cambridge, a strong positive correlation between the three factors is revealed. Areas will the highest magnitude of human activities and densest concentration of paths generate higher sound amplitudes/frequencies. Areas with latent activities generate the lowest amplitudes of sounds. Using Kinect Sensor and Processing, our model allows the player to cut a specific transect through the city and reveal frequencies along the path mapped out by the player’s hand. An audio-visual response is created by the player’s hand movement in real time based on the collected data. While the sound frequency/amplitudes along the path are displayed through sound waves on the physical urban model through simultaneous projection, the player also hears the sounds along the path. Ultimately, the simultaneous feedback between the movement, sound, and visuals enable a new methodology of sensing the ideal city through human interaction and participation.

Collaborators: Sudeshna Sen, Ashutosh Singhal

John Hartell Gallery Exhibition

Exhibition Dates: August 15-September 9, 2016

Collaborators: Liu Jingyang, Yue Gu

Cornell Council of Arts Grant (CCA)

Polyphony is an interactive audio-visual installation that generates a simultaneous feedback loop between performance, image, and sound. Two juxtaposing systems are designed for Polyphony. One system focuses on dematerializing a medium through cymatics. The second system uses a multi-agent swarm system that maps people's visual interactions between the target and agent points, generating complex and mysterious sounds. Kinect sensors are set up in front of the projectors at John Hartell Gallery to detect people's body pixels using motion detection. The information collected by Kinect become inputs for two sets of designed algorithms in Processing and Supercollider, generating simultaneous graphical and audio responses. The project aims to address the issue of collective movement within public space by inviting visitors into it, transforming the installation space into a dynamic performance platform, and instigating social interaction. Polyphony challenges the visitor's psycho-physical intuition about the physical space and blurs the boundaries between different forms of media through human-technology interactivity.

https://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/yue-gu-liu-jingyang-and-shining-christina-sun-polyphony

Collaborator: Ibrahim Desooky

Sound and Image Installation

Professor: Andrew Lucia & Taylan Cihan

Collaborator: Evan Rawn, Rina Kang

Date: Spring 2014

Cymatics, the visual representation of sound, was our method of creating a direct correlation between sound and image. This method provided the raw material for production of visuals and sounds as well as a material palette of different frequencies and their corresponding visual effect. Different patterns were observed: sometimes symmetrical and concentric and other times more chaotic and variable. The frequencies that produced the most complex and dynamic patterns constituted an underlying framework for the audio. As a result, low-pass filters were applied to a composed soundscape to provide the audio component for a video, as well as the movement of water captured in a series of still images. The series of images produced reveal qualities that are not inherently obvious as water in its literal form, but imply a greater depth that defamiliarizes the medium.

Soft Robotics Installations

Collaborator: Mingyue Zhang

Date: Fall 2016

The installation explores tactile sense and response through the creation of a field of soft robotic prototypes that transform as people touch them. Through intensive research into soft robotics and ways of controlling pneumatic structure, we were able to precisely control how the prototypes would bend, twist, and expand with pressurized air. We chose silicone as the material for casting because of its flexibility and softness. Casting prototypes with silicone out of 3D printed molds, we then tested how the thinness of the material affects the transparency and force of the tentacles as they were filled with air. Connected to proximity sensor, these prototypes quickly reacted to people's movement and touch, provoking people to engage with them through various interactions.