24 The Line

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The project intends to investigate the meaning of the line and widen the threshold across multi-disciplinary fields through the architectural instrument, inventing an incubator of innovation and collaboration for the North Design Union. In this design, we want to test the possibility of generating diversity by exploring one architectural element.

COLLABORATOR

Yutian Wang

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STATUS

competition

Top 31, North Design Union Headquarters - architecture design competition 2019

‘Very powerful, and yet effective, concept and spatial organisation/division. Good dynamics and a consistent idea throughout the whole project, separating and yet connecting activities.’
-- Benedetta Tagliabue

REFERENCE

‘I also showed him the way in which the thick walls of old construction should now be seperated into an exterior wall in its own right and an interior wall in its own right. The seperation become a space of its own.’ We follow Louis Kahn who re-discover the space inside the wall, hoping to create new space there.

--Law and Rule in Architecture, Louis Kahn essential texts

‘he enters the house and finally meets the mysterious and reportedly all-powerful third policeman, Fox, who has the face of Mathers.Fox's secret police station is in the walls of Mathers's house.He tells the narrator that he is the architect of the readings in the underground chamber, which he alters for his amusement.’ Also, Yung Ho Chang recreate the police station in between the walls in his project also called as ‘the third police’

7600sqm

Line, in an abstract sense, is an invisible threshold that is simultaneously thin and thick. Line sets up a boundary, and also could be the opportunity for crossing.

The most prominent architectural move- a diagonally cut through the building, where each floor is divided by this conceptual “WALL” into two compartments-open office space and interactive urban public space, purposefully misaligned between typical office level and public space level, which suggests dynamic visual dialogue between each two levels of activities and offers the heterogeneous spatial character of always seeing and being seen. This new typological intervention creates reciprocity between concentration and interaction as responding to the present homogeneous working environment as general.

Through its minum footprint occupancy on ground and maximized 30m height on elevation, the exterior of the building resembles massive screen exhibiting the creative design process from NDU designers at all levels, which will engage the city with an open plaza that emerged with ground floor lobby entry, auditorium and cafeteria.
The concept is furtherarticulated by challenging the traditional centralized office core layout and proposing an inside-out expressed core that grows from the central diagonal LINE - two pairs of scenic lifts are allocated in two atriums thatone dedicated to office and the other serves for public spaces, while the egress stairs and servise zone are exposed at the two ends defining a vigorous urban interface.

Using line as division, connection, integration, comunication, and accomodation.

In this project, we aim to establish a new pedagogical model that embraces both conditions through thinking “LINE” as new spatial apparatus. The line generates spatial division of two clear territories, where a flexibly defined “third” space dancing in between, amorphous in terms of both abstract form and articulated functionality, encourages clarity on plan and differentiation on section.