Biometamorphic Architecture: Organ transplantation clinic and laboratory Part 2 Project 2009 Jonathan AlottoJaenes Bong Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture de Paris | France Biometamorphic Architecture: Organ transplantation clinic and laboratory Author: Jonathan Alotto / Jaenes Bong In the 21-century, Bio-medical development of organ transplantation has opened up the possibility for patients to replace their dysfunctional body parts from donated individuals. According to global statistic, due to the lack of organs supply, an increasing number of patients are waiting for life saving treatments as many are suffering from long term illness. The project is sited in Hong Kong, a city known for its world class reputation on trading industry since the British Colonization. The architectural investigation explores the notion of trade in bio-medical transplantation. This controversial design speculates a new mode of activities and architectural model by bringing a place for private [Organ] trading. Inspired by Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', the hell’s scenery abstracted the metamorphic relationship between human and nature. It leads us to a poetic narrative which we wanted to create a proposal that reflects Hong Kong’s hidden natural beauty and its Chinese spiritual mythology. The design methodology convoluted the boundaries between actual and digital explorations in a series of drawings and models which investigated the visual perception on building typology and spatial formation upon the quality of mysterious landscapes and ecological design. The final proposal is a semi-living translation clinic surgically nestled in the topographical conditions of the mid-level hill gardens and grows behind a modernistic old hospital façade. The biological design approach allows sophisticated control over the morphing of natural and artificial architectural elements, encoding hidden agendas within its volumes and circulations. Its technological green building envelope farms pharmaceutical ingredients, blending and disguising private programs, but also providing a public garden within the ecology of the hilly city. Tutor’s statement: Jaenes and Jonathan’s project serves as an important metaphor for the hybridized cultural and topographical qualities of Hong Kong, represented through a set of beautifully narrated digital poetic drawings and models. Their early studies and final design proposal formed a tremendous body of work that consists of intense process drawings, controversially explored the actual and virtual conditions of the mysterious narrative landscapes in terms of complex systems: east and west cultural roots, natural and artificial tectonics, public and dangerously private circulations, the true and the disguised identities, stolen and not stolen kidneys storages… Legal but perceived with disbelief, the controversial design lies within an intertextual representation methodology that nonetheless serves as the righteous and powerful spatial tool for one to experience Jaenes and Jonathan’s designs- through fragmented explorations into the most mysterious but sublime spatial conditions of life and death. Justin C.K. LauKenny Kinugasa-Tsui Tutor(s)