2049 Intersexual Meta-Bureau
Inspired by the scenes depicted in Ursula K. Le Guin’s science-fiction The Left Hand of Darkness, that is, a world without sexism on an icebound planet, this project foretells a scenario that Ningbo, a seaport city, bedevilled by a severe flood in 2049, whose historical inheritances of the intercultural fusion promise the arrival of the new perspective. Navigating through various spaces, the architecture offers a metamorphosing journey related with a metaphorical water treatment process for visitors’ transformation, as well as the water’s presence in the context of Yong River. Situating in between reality and fiction, the project fictitiously speculates a tangible reality in the future.
Within this drawing of the city’s tapestry, I explored my interest in the study of cartography, attempted to discover its unrevealed mysteries as an alternative archaeology which delivers a comprehensive narrative, in which the architecture would become the sanctum sanctorum for the transition of a gonochorist is purified and sublimated to a psychologically androgynous being.
Mapping through the spectacle of the psychogeography, I started with connecting the ley line hidden between the Dharma King Temple and the Christian Church, the two most prominent religious architectures on site, as it happens, which is perpendicular with the north-south axis. Intersecting the magicked [Yong river]current, the ley line implies the propitious location for the project. The presence of the water on site occurred to me the Gaston Bachelard’s idea about the metaphysical relationship between water and our unconscious mind. Studying on the transactions between humans and water-related activities, elements emerged from the city’s historical tapestry. At the centre of the map, the concentric circles are used symbolically to represent the ongoing Monomyth in the narrative in which the architecture could preach its gender spectrum towards its surroundings.
Conceptual Massing on the site
Inspired by Lee Bontecou, whose artworks remind me of the battle between synthetic wholeness and disjunctive entropy, I endeavoured to investigate a similar approach to concretize the design configuration. In order to exploit both 2d and 3d aspects, I experimented on a sequence of interconnected drawings and models.
As the partis demonstrated, I focused on dimensions and proportions of different components in the building. Considering the ley line discovered previously as the cardinal direction, I coordinated the spaces by overlapping the diaphanous layers and darks, tested on potential massing and shading with the site’s surroundings. Subsequently, several key spaces allocated with more specific functions were studied on, such as the auditorium hall where the hydraulophone (water pipe organ) would be played, as a ritualistic performance and the consulting units where the visitors could communicate with the therapists, etc.
Furthermore, these functional requirements determined the scale and relationship between different parts. Models made of watercolour paper helped me to design the circulations for visitors’ journey through the building and figure out the initial forms.
Playing with the emblematic architectural elements in Ningbo, the Caisson
ceiling (meaning ‘algae well’) from Baoguo Temple and the pointed arches from
the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, I intended to piece an integrity combined
by the city’s dichotomous identities. In that sense, the process is akin to the
transfiguration of the enshrined androgyne in a society dominated by dualistic
gender conception. Thus, I placed the figure of the double-headed Guanyin as a
hint to convey this thought. In addition, the use of the geomantic omen ball and
the dissected hairpin found on site, presents my idea of orienting the building with
the respect to the geomancy.
1 – Departure & Initiation
2 - Threshold
3 - Temptation
4 – Acquisition
5 - Enlightenment
6 - Purification
7 - Transmutation
8 – Resurrection
The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale.
— Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a
Thousand of Faces