Tianyao (Tyler) Song

Inwardly Permeable

In this project, the boundary of privacy is no longer top-down imposed by the architects but bottom-up defined by the residents according to their customized comfort zone. A wide and long balcony connects the front of every apartment and provides a transitional platform for bringing life from home to the common space. A series of curtains and movable walls are freely controlled by the residents to define the level of privacy as well as the inward permeability from the public to the private.

Rooms are no longer divided according to the pre-set program. A dispersed collection of movable furniture replaces functional rooms and becomes the direct component of domesticity, assembling in a crude fashion. Domesticity is able to permeate in-between the private balcony, the apartment, and the shared terrace attributing to the movability of the furniture. Interaction constantly happens with fluid domesticity when people wall through the common terrace. The boundary between the individual and the community becomes vague and dynamic.

The central courtyard is the climax of collectiveness where urban farming takes place, with a series of shared infrastructures and facilities as plug-ins including a sports court, a common shed, a barbecue spot, a leisure bridge, and a biogas pumping and filling station. An ecosystem of organic waste disposal, crop cultivation and energy production is created through collective acts of farming, recycling, and dispatching. Sitting in-between the farm and the buildings, the infrastructures and facilities not only provide additional communal spacesto the community but also complex the edge condition and soften the boundary of the farm, encouraging activities to permeate into the central area.