Chuchu Qi a.k.a. Chuchu
selected works [architecture]
Gentle Collision
Critic: Hans Tursack
Spring 2022 | Optional Studio
St. Louis, MO
In the post-war architectural imaginary, architectural campuses are defined by collage, fragmentation, overlay, and historical sampling. Carlo Aymonino’s “assembly of known buildings” for East Rome, James Stirling’s autobiographical scatters for his office’s entry into the Roma Interrotta exhibition, and Stan Allen’s generative exploration of “dissonance and disjunction” in Piranesi’s Campo Marzio plan all speak to urban compositional dispositions that privilege play, happenstance juxtapositions, and weak-or open-form over top down composition.
Using the Jan van Eyck Academie and the European Graduate School as precedents, the project is aim to created an architectural micro-campus—an institute for the study of philosophy, visual arts, and critical theory—using The site was a former regional airfield in western St. Louis along the Missouri River. Program requirements included residencies, seminar rooms, a large lecture hall, a public exhibition space, scenic overlook towers, a semi-public sculpture park, and outdoor meditation spaces.
Using the Jan van Eyck Academie and the European Graduate School as precedents, the project is aim to created an architectural micro-campus—an institute for the study of philosophy, visual arts, and critical theory—using The site was a former regional airfield in western St. Louis along the Missouri River. Program requirements included residencies, seminar rooms, a large lecture hall, a public exhibition space, scenic overlook towers, a semi-public sculpture park, and outdoor meditation spaces.
Maya Animation as Iteration
This studio project started with an experimentation with the happenings of Maya animation, which provides analogy for typology study and the generation of the aggregated system. Resonated with the idea of field-condition and urban-collage precedents, the campus plan is composited in a loose connection between architectural spaces, layered by landscape and infrastructure system.
Layering as Composition
By catagorized each segment in the design from big scale to small scale (landscape, infrastructure, transportatoin, house, pavilian, furniture...), I layered them together as a composed “urban fragment”, incoperated agents in different layers and enabled the whole urban fragment to grow over time, like a city.
Exploded Diagram of Differnt Layers
The project reimagined the architectural micro-campus as a compositional problem through the phenomenological lens of a video game user, fore-fronting real-time discovery, accident, and visual precocity.
