Masque of Silence

[Statement]

The thesis aims at invoking analogical architecture upon the question of how to read history and precedents in the open resource culture today. Formal consistency lies in the design process o f copying transforming motif. Aldo Rossi and O. M. Ungers’s projects and methodology are taken as precedents and material for exploring formal genealogy. Propensity to understand and define rigorous design methods and internal processes of architecture, by organizing, classifying , index and comparison, always invoke the vastness of world itself. By means of drawing and redrawing, inevitable alteration, invention and personal interpretation are involved as means of creation.

Analogical Rossi

By mashing up Rossi’s works., certain formal types are found of repetitive use in his projects. The forms are resulting from analogies to historical building forms. Then Rossi buildt up his architecture cosmos by these materials. Typological migration can be seen in his use of the formal types. They are transformed to new design vocabulary in respond to site and program, and assembled with small shift.

Morphological Ungers

Ungers considers architecture as themes. Rather than reduction to the historical forms, Ungers use the method of morphological principle on forms by breaking, bending, dividing ,inverting, overlapping, etc to achieve complexity. The repeated themes such as ‘Russion doll’, ‘city in miniature’ observes the same principles, striving to be both rich and pure, powerful and free. The themes are achieved in his project by operative seeing on the image.

[Project]

The project is recuring Rossi and Ungers with personal analogy process. A series of structures – cemeteries and memorials are proposed at inclined topography in Hangzhou as extension of existing public cemetery. Analogical and Morphological principles are adopted by transforming the pitch roof archetype that is always read as ‘ House’ with the theme of ‘inverse house’ for the House of the other world. Primitive forms are embraced for silence and stillness atmosphere of the cemetery. While the strategy of ‘Masque’, recuring Rossi and Unger’s reading of city as city of individual buildings or archipelagos.

House of Riddle
Approached from an inverted pitch roof to a memorial with the scale of a minimal bungalow in the courtyard , house of riddle leads to a labyrinth under a platform with generic grid of skylights, representing the mysterious nature of life. All walls of the memorial is pointing to the central representing a reversed house.

House of Memory
Fragments are interconnected by imposed order like the way memory is re-constructed. Rossi’s iconic figure in project Cemetery of Modena is recurring as a negative extraction from ground linking several structures – half buried habbitable towers, house – shaped passage, burial space extracted form ground and road crossing the structure.D

House of Oblivion
Oblivion starts at the same time of rememberance. Going inside the structure from the pitch roof portal, one is actually starting going outside by continuos transformation of the wall and roof to inverted, going out between the gap of two.

House of Opposition
Life never exists without death. House of oppositions consists two opposite courtyards. One follows the inclined slope with protruded perimeter walls, the other substracted from the topography. Pathway carved from the volume in between with ‘house’ shape at one end and the inverted ‘house’ at the other implies the most mysterious process that one can imagine.

House of Heaven
The uppermost structure House of heaven is a patio integrated with topography. The patio is a slope, is the channel down which sky flows in the human house.