Looking Outwards 3

Project: Cloud Village

Creator: Philip F. Yuan and team

Year of Creation: 2018 for the Venice Architecture Biennale

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Cloud Village is an abstract architectural piece aimed at representing the metaphor between private and public spaces/realms in China. The project itself contains four separate open room-like spaces, with a twisting roof connecting the spaces to create a curved u-shaped form from top-down. The materiality itself is a permeable recycled plastic structure, with robotic fabrication being used at every step to pre-fabricate each part before it was assembled on site. The architect also used a “topological optimization algorithm” to calculate structural performances within the curved roof. What I admire about this project is that each part of it–from the material choice, to the form or method of fabrication, all tied back to the architect’s intention and theme of the project. While the recycled plastic material allowed for the creation of a  permeable material in the fabrication process, it also tied back to the environmental issues surrounding China and approached architectural building materials from a critical standpoint.