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Urban Archive: Rethinking Time and Weathering in the Design Process

Part 2 Project 2021
Subin Park
 University of Hong Kong | China
The fate of architecture in postindustrial cities like Hong Kong includes rapid erasure and reconstruction—an efficient, often linear process that tends to neglect the potential value and architectural information of the past. Every building is vulnerable to weathering through time, but current architectural practices resist from natural processes of decay. Urban Archive is situated within the reality of change. It applies weathering as a tool for design to break away from conventional modes of architectural design, construction, and representation. Ultimately, the project itself results from a design process through making and unmaking, transforming the building into a device and index for documenting spatial and material transformation.

More than simply a meditation on the inevitability of decay, Urban Archive reconsiders how a specific method of construction(found object+cast+formwork) can be an alternative to trends of commemoration and commercialization in architectural preservation. The texture of the old structure, imprinted on the new concrete cast, offers users to read it as material/spatial information about the past, from tectonic relationships to material specificities to the particulars of place. Here, architectural preservation becomes both an act of archiving and regeneration, with a unique spatial form that conveys information in ways that are distinctive from how architecture’s history is archived and experienced.

Subin Park
Tutor(s)
2021
“Weathering on Site” In a post-industrial city such as Hong Kong, every building is eventually vulnerable to weathering and obsolescence over time no matter what program/function it serves.
“Weathering in Design Process” The new design method privileges weathering as a key, catalytic tool for the making of physical spaces.
“Characters of Space” The three distinctive modes of spatial creation, including Corroder, Accumulator, and Scraper takes advantage of weathering’s generative potential while allowing users to have different spatial and material experiences every time the
“The Weathering Shipyard” Corroder, Accumulator, and Scraper are strategically situated in the weathering shipyard intervening between roof and interior, the walls of two individual buildings, and the ground.
“Making Device for Archiving” In pushing beyond the notion of decay as aesthetic condition, Urban Archive challenges the conventional modes of architectural representation involving sets of drawings that only communicate the end-product by building and re
“Method of Construction: Found Object + Formwork + Cast = Archiving “ The texture and the remnant imprinted on the new concrete cast by the former structure allows the users to read structural, material, and site-based traces of the past.
“Archiving through Making” The notion of preservation becomes an act of archiving via the act of construction itself - a contrast to how architecture and its history is typically archived, preserved, and understood.
“Archiving through Photographs” As the project progresses, the red fragments representing the existing gradually fade away, replaced by the concrete and wooden frame structure, which itself composes the new red fragments over time.
“Speculating the Future” The design process does not end with the four time frames here, but projects forward as an on-going and continuous process of deriving the new from the old.
“Continuity of Transformation” Urban Archive highlights the design process as possessive of both a history, present, and future, while the architect’s method of representation transforms architecture into a living thing that evolves from and with the city
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