Canals at Guyana. © Yue Wu.
Jury
Peter J. Kindel (Chair)
Yichun Liu
Wenlei Xi
Ting Yu
Few would look at a highway interchange, an electrical grid, or a suburb and perceive agency or activity in its static arrangement. Spaces and urban organizations are usually treated, not as actors, but as collections of objects or volumes.
Keller Easterling
Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space
What does it mean to live together?
To live together means to follow a spatial contract. Infrastructure, as a component of material life, captures the structural problem of contemporary society, and produces intricate social and legal ramifications. In this way, I propose an exploration of the role of infrastructure as a spatial contract in modern life through drawing to understand how it enables us to live together generously.
This report contains documentation, analysis, and exploration based on my trip to Japan and Guyana, supported by the SOM Foundation. It also includes representations created based on the observations from the trip to show my speculations towards how we will generously live together.
Purpose
My project is twofold: to document the sites in the trip, as well as to reinterpret them. I intend to study and speculatively reinterpret the sites in the two destinations, each of which represents a different approach towards the custodian of the spatial contract—the infrastructure.
In a postsocial media age, I follow a self-conscious exploration of the notion of physical travel to the site. Especially when the sites embed the tangible relationship and reveal how we co-live with each other and the physical space. I recognize and highlight the relationship between people and people, people and space, and space and space.
Exploring the infrastructure in a more polarized and marginalized age, I aim to mine the implications of both spatial and digital artifacts and speculate how we will live together. My travels provide a spatial corollary to the digital research and distant production I undergo before and after the trip.
We always come back to the human equation.
DATA in “Code of Honor”
Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987)
Final Report
My final report contains three parts. These comprise my finding from my SOM Foundation China Prize travel fellowship trip to Japan during June 2018 and to Guyana during January 2018.
I. Documentation
The report starts with a synthesis of my travel to Japan and Guyana, which forms the bulk of analysis and documentation of multiple sites of interest, across the cities of Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Tokyo, Takamatsu, Seto Inland Sea, and Georgetown. A site map for each destination is included, indicating the locations of all the visited sites, and highlighting the selected sites. The photographs in this part were taken during the trip, unless otherwise noted.
II. Representation
This part includes a series of drawings and diagrams generated during the trip, which capture the immediacy of my travel experience. Short but intuitive, these visual representations display both the artifacts from the trip and the starting points for my future exploration regarding the four types of forces of infrastructure, both physical and virtual. After returning from the trip, these artifacts have been reproduced and are accompanied by the maps tracing my travel route to help understand how we are living together.
III. Speculation
Drawn after the trip, these sets of architectural illustrations speculate upon the selected sites, each representing a possible future scenario regarding how we will live together. How might the urban and suburban landscape consisting of the diverse infrastructure change? What might we, as human, continuously experience on these two complex destinations with extremely different density.
Canals at Guyana. © Yue Wu.
Guest House at Kyoto. © Yue Wu.
Namba Park. © Yue Wu.
Guest House at Osaka. © Yue Wu.
Seiko Temple. © Yue Wu.
Speculation of Mega Infrastructure. © Yue Wu.
Speculation of Virtual Infrastructure. © Yue Wu.
Umeda Sky Building. © Yue Wu.
Locations
My project is sited in two destinations, both of which have been indelibly changed by the infrastructure: Japan and Guyana.
Japan has been dramatically influenced by the infrastructure in two dimensions. The first is the emerging megastructure in the megalopolis, including Tokyo, and Osaka, due to the highly concentrated people and things (Macro). The second is the everyday life anonymous architecture phenomena led by the high land price (Intermediate).
On the other hand, as a developing country near the Caribbean Sea, Guyana’s human agglomerations are gradually transformed due to the tinier influences, namely the specific material- and object-based infrastructure (Micro), as well as the invisible artifacts, taking digital network for instance (Virtual).
Yue Wu
Tongji University
Yue Wu
was born and grew up in Shaoxing and Quzhou, Zhejiang Province, China. He received his Bachelor of Architecture Degree in June 2015 from Dalian University of Technology, with a distinguished graduate award. Since September 2015, Wu has been studying for his Master of Architecture degree at Tongji University, majoring in architecture theory and practice, for which he will receive his degree in June 2018. Under the supervision of famous Chinese domestic architect Lizhi Ren, Wu has developed a personal research interest in urban-rural relations, rural development, and informal self-construction. Concurrent with his study, Wu has also practiced as an architecture and urban design intern in the offices of Kengo Kuma & Associates, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and SOM in Shanghai.