AA Inter One sent 3form all of our garbage and immediately got it back again – slightly repackaged, but significantly transformed. Thousands of discarded plastic bottles and containers form our reconstituted chaise-lounge, allowing one to recline in the refuse of everyday life. And from this position of recumbence, home-grown cherries are delivered from a chandelier of tomatoes draping down from above. Unlike ‘globe’ tomatoes – the tomato of international commerce – our cultivars need not be modified with thicker, waxier, hyper-resilient skins to ensure their survival during travel. This fruit is provided at arms reach, not via the cargo hold of a 747, and these plant roots are suspended over a steady mist of recycled rain water, not entrenched in the earth several continents away. The shallow roots develop only to the minimum depth necessary to suck in nutrients from a feeder tube – a computer controlled aeroponic pipeline that keeps the fruit alive, merrily growing day and night underneath the high pressure sodium street lamps. Here, we hold nature captive, serving our needs: from the brise soleil of yardlong beans to the security system provided by the blackberry thorns, our vegetation forms the architecture, blurring the boundary of ‘natural’ building materials. Our materials are not just ‘green’, they are still alive.

Through this temporal interplay we propose a new type of English Pastoral, an alternative type of controlled growth for our eccentric Hong Kong site. The Captive-Nature-Nutrient-Tube holding our vegetation is manufactured by means of a highly precise array of computer-controlled machinery at 3form’s advanced fabrication laboratory, providing a bespoke material to suit our application needs – an ecoglass™. Officially certified as ‘food grade’ material, this product is perfectly suitable for cultivating our herbs without poisoning us or them. And although the entire façade is constructed from the throw-away residues of our consumption, it has been painstakingly transformed by 3form’s scientists into a highly engineered, serviceable and overtly intelligent product; allowing us to be elegantly enveloped in our own refuse.

And when we are done with it, tired of it and need something a little better, faster, cleaner, and differently designed, we will scrap the entire façade and send 3form our garbage once again. They have already promised to melt it all down and in return, produce something shiny, fresh and new.

‘Bring Your Own Biennale’ (BYOB) is a catchphrase, framework, and approach envisioned to stimulate our collective role in the creation of an innovative Bi-City Biennale between Hong Kong and Shenzhen. It calls for individual participation and networked collaboration – working within and outside boundaries to generate unexpected results. BYOB makes the process of cultural production transparent, an approach that relies on the citizens and the city’s infrastructure for our Bi-City engagement. It is at once contextual but also reflective, a unique opportunity to speculate on what our impact on the metropolis could be.

Our Biennale’s central location in the future West Kowloon Cultural District provides an open platform for dialogue. By inviting inventive practices into the site, we will build upon people’s interest and their participation to formulate this Biennale. Our Biennale is not a frozen, definitive statement comprised of vacant representations of architecture –but alive with debate, events, and activity inspired from performative practices. The Hong Kong component of the Bi-City Biennale is about creating fresh tools, new ways of working, designing intelligence, and appropriating mechanisms that deal with direct feedback to engage the public. This ‘public’ is diverse and we embrace this diversity in the ownership of space- where public good, public space and the public domain can be re-conceptualized. Diversity within cities and the creation of cultural capital is complex, as exemplified by Sharon Zukin’s critique on the ‘representations of culture in public space’ in parks, art museums, and city streets. Thus BYOB asks: how is public culture defined? Who has the right to experience, conceptualize and control culture? In essence we are publishing a real-time ‘Users Manual’ for this diversity, where the West Kowloon promenade site becomes a backdrop for creative speculation and dynamic ingenuity. We learn from people, from nature, from our daily interactions, and we are inspired by everyday practices, appreciate the informality and spontaneity that rubs up against the rigid, the formal and the planned. Here we create ephemera and use weblogs as social levellers to share and exchange information in order to generate new models and paradigms which fully embraces the creative cultural practice of architecture, art and urbanism.

Visit www.hkszbiennale.org for more information.

CURATORIAL TEAM

Marisa Yiu | Chief Curator

Alan Lo | Curator for Arts, City Integration and Events

Eric Schuldenfrei | Curator for Exhibition, Education, Film and Media

Frank Yu | Curator for Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape

Claude Wong, Solomon Fong, Wang Ho (Gravity Partnership Ltd.) | Architectural Planning team

Amber Young | Project Manager

Chow Kayan, Sze Pui Ki, Janice Ho | Curatorial Coordinators

Nick Gu, Jiaxin Chum (ESKYIU Ltd.) | Exhibition, Design Media and Fabrication team

Sam Yu | Project Officer

Chinatown Design Lab Panelist organized by the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative of Asian Americans for Equality (AAFE) and an Architecture and Urban Design firm. Workshops were held to bring artists, architects, community activists, and landscape architects together to create urban design guidelines to reflect the value and history of the Chinatown community for key public spaces like the East River Waterfront. As a panelist, the series of proposals and sketches deal with exchange, integration and Celebration for Chinatown’s East River waterfront Development . How is New York’s Chinatown defined today and how can it play a key role in the East River development plan? The complexity of Chinatown’s history and image has undergone dramatic transformation since the immigration act of 1965, and now offers an exciting challenge for a new vision and revitalization that fosters positive transformation whilst creating a distinct and integrated neighborhood within neighborhoods.

The design approach deals with a balanced system of integrating the wider lower east side’s community, its access as a new edge and entry way on the East river waterfront to Manhattan, an open greenway for exchange (socially and economically) and a place to celebrate and honor the existing inhabitants, and immigrants that have contributed to the livelihood of Manhattan’s Chinatown. These connections play itself back to a larger global context of ‘exchange’ to China and other Asian cities, in hopes to open and widen New York’s Chinatown as not an introverted enclave but one that integrates and diversifies itself to other communities and environments. Creative lighting solutions, streetscapes delineating connectivity through art and sculpture, affordable housing proposals, revived garment districts, open space, green parks, cultural and community activities and opportunities that help to support small businesses are vital for this potentially dynamic area of Manhattan.

ReSource Vitrine: A didactic diorama
‘FARMING FACTORY’
by ESKYIU: Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu

ReSource Vitrine captures the essence of our current research in architecture by illustrating a prototypical community, a ‘Farming Factory’, which forms part of a network of urban infrastructures integrating both local and global communities together to test our model for creating a socially sustainability environment. We use this approach to extend the landscape, to review the line between public and private, between the landscape and built form, farming and factory production, vineyard and art, showrooms and sustainable recycling systems. Roadside noise barriers of vegetative growth connect regional cities to megacities; all the while socio-economic forces at play compel us to address issues related to the globality of a local factory that has a residual impact on how wisely our resources are spent from Southern China all the way to New York City.

We learn from visiting factories located in the Greater Pearl River Delta of China. One factory has two hundred and fifty thousand workers that produce paper products for the rest of the world. Interspersed within the compound and in neighboring fields lies farmland cultivating fresh vegetables for consumption by the workers. Opposed to dormitories for the single migrant worker found within the typical factory, here employees are encouraged to bring their entire family. In addition to other community facilities, schools provide education for the workers children, libraries encourage further education, and informal learning centers continue; sports grounds and karaoke stations attempt to provide a balanced life within.

This factory reveals another side of the reality of the cultural, social, and economic progress that can be found throughout China today, where some factory complexes serve as contemporary villages. ReSource Vitrine thus asks can farming factories such as these perform as ‘positive’ social registers and models of potential for the next China? We combine, integrate ongoing projects and projective visions in this installation with past and ongoing research of ‘Linear Landscapes’, ‘Urban Pastoral’, ‘Heirloom’, ‘Chinatown WORK’, and ‘Farming Factory in Southern China’ as an interactive visual play of a model world for the Architectural League Prize 2010 exhibition.

Images from the Gallery show the installation during different times of the day and interaction and reflection with and of viewers. Installation images at night reveal the interior of the Vitrine- where the strips of Light reflect infinitively into the landscape – presenting similar cycles to Southern China spaces of production and consumption. The milled and hand crafted installation integrates- the research and design projects: ‘Farming Factory’; ‘Urban Pastoral’ and ‘Noise Barrier’ into this site specific installation as a model community of Social Sustainability ideals. During the day the Vitrine dissolves and reflects the surroundings of New York City.
The Vitrine’s transparency is intensified by the presence of the viewer’s proximity to the installation, where the viewer controls and partakes in the performance and production of information both conceptually and visually. A two-way mirror is employed with specific attention to site placement, dimensions and testing of various material technologies to affectively extend and repeat the architecture’s modulation as a potentially repetitive yet differentiated urban strategy.

Acknowledgment/ Team Credits:
Designers: Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu;
Design Team: Eric Schuldenfrei, Marisa Yiu, Nick Gu, Jiaxin Chum;
Installation coordination: Arik Wilson, Fanny Sze, Bill Chan, Kevin Wei.

ESKYIU would like to thank and acknowledge the Architectural League for support of this installation,  in particular Anne Rieselbach and Nick Anderson; and the wonderful Esquel group for much support in our work.

About the Organizers and Exhibition

http://archleague.org

“ESKYIU’s “ReSource Vitrine”, a didactic diorama,” consolidates the elements of a number of their urban infrastructure projects which integrate horticulture and recycled materials- from a vertical landscape to an urban noise barrier- to create a scheme for a socially and environmentally sustainable community. Their intricate models situates CNC-milled structures in a field of hand-cut tubes packed together to form an abstract landscape. The transparency of the vitrines two-way mirrored case is modulated through sensor-controlled lighting whose intensity varies in response to the presence of the viewer, alternately concealing and revealing the model”.
-    Excerpt from RESOURCE exhibition flyer, written by Anne Rieselbach, Program Director , Architectural League

2010 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers
June 23-August 6, 2010
Arnold and Sheila Aronson Galleries, Sheila C. Johnson Design Center, Parsons The New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue, New York City

The gallery is open daily from 12:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. and late Thursday evenings until 8:00 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibition will also be open on the evenings of the lectures.

The League thanks the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons The New School for Design for co-sponsoring the exhibition and lecture series. The Architectural League Prize is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.  The program is also supported by the LEF Foundation, and by Dornbracht, Ibex Construction, Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn.
Architectural League programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency.

The Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers is an annual juried competition and series of lectures and exhibitions organized by the Architectural League and its  Committee. The Prize was established to recognize specific works of high quality and to encourage exchange. Winners’ designs are also on display on the Architectural League’s website and illustrated in a catalogue published by Princeton Architectural Press. The Architectural League Prize is made possible, in part, by public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.  The program is also supported by the LEF Foundation, and by Dornbracht, Ibex Construction, Susan Grant Lewin Associates, and Tischler und Sohn.

Diced Nature focuses on the displacement of nature and the naturalization process that occurs in the kitchen. The installation utilizes a real-time processing program to form a document out of multiple layers of information. Created using a high-speed camera to capture slow motion, a live-feed video that feeds information into the program in real-time, footage taken with a time-lapse camera and an animation that accommodates the different layers within the project, the displacement of time was read across the multiple mediums to create a work that forms a dialogue with nature.

Commissioned by Agnes Gund, President Emerita of MoMA, for her private collection and featured in an in-depth article for the New York Times entitled, ‘Art meets Artichoke’.

Chinatown WORK, 2006 is an interactive public art installation for multiple sites in Chinatown. Silhouettes of pedestrians mix the footage of interior work spaces with time-lapse exterior street images of unique areas that define New York’s Chinatown contemporary work culture. The piece focuses on those industries that helped to establish and provide immigrants’ employment in New York in the past and still today. The interactive and responsive installation encourages community participation in the changing landscape of Chinatown while celebrating the people who made and still are contributing to this exceptional part of Lower Manhattan. For the light box component of the piece, Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei collaborated with 3-form material solutions and October Ai to construct a sewn map of lower Manhattan and develop a socially and environmentally conscious material for the optimum keying of the technological needs of this project. The first site installation is at the HSBC facade on Canal Street (58 Bowery Branch). The artists are also planning for installations at other sites in Chinatown for the summer of 2006.

The Public Arts installation is made possible by the generous support of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant for Art in Public Spaces, the September 11th Fund, the Manhattan Community Arts Fund supported by the Department of Cultural Affairs, 3-form material solutions and Asian American Arts Centre. The project is endorsed by the Rebuild Chinatown Initiative (RCI), Explore Chinatown Campaign and assisted by Chinatown Partnership LDC. First site provided by HSBC at Canal Street facade at the 58 Bowery Branch. Opening reception generously supported by Chivas Regal and hosted by the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

project description

“There’s no place for factories, and there’s no place for the Chinese immigrants to live,” said Robert Weber. “People double up in smaller and smaller places—we had 10,000 applications for 52 subsidized housing units on Norfolk Street’ (Washington Post, May 21, 2005)

The textile-apparel-retail chain is based on an intense mixture of high technology, physical labor, economy, and efficiency that constantly responds to or anticipates the demand of market dynamics. From the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, a garment factory in Chinatown was filmed for a project relating to the study of the physical nature of the global apparel assembly industry. Two months after the tragic events of September 11th, the factory was forced to close due to many external pressures. A study done by the Asian American Federation of New York in the first two weeks after September 11th noted that three-quarters of the workforce in Chinatown, nearly 25,000 workers, lost their jobs. In 2001, there were approximately 500 garment factories in Chinatown, and now, according to the New York State Department of Labor, there are only about 100 left. Not only were many jobs lost; the sense of place and the nature of community activity were significantly effected. As one of the employees stated, “it allowed us a flexible schedule, to drop our kids off, come to work and be around a community of people.” In the last quarter of 2002, more than 90% of the surveyed restaurants, garment factories, and retail stores anticipated an inability to recover to their pre-September 11th levels.

Five years later, Eric Schuldenfrei and Marisa Yiu explored and filmed many areas of contemporary street life including food markets, herb stores, pharmacies, jewelry storefronts, and specialty stores, from banking activities to construction work, in order to ask questions about how Chinatown is doing today and where it is heading. Concurrently, with the owners, manufacturers’, and employees’ permission (at times difficult to obtain), the artists were allowed to film and document the interiors of garment factories, laundries, and restaurants that are typically hidden to the public. In the public art installation Chinatown WORK, 2006, silhouettes of pedestrians mix the footage of interior work spaces of with time-lapse exterior street images of unique areas that define the work culture of New York’s contemporary Chinatown. The piece focuses on industries that have helped to establish immigrants and provide them with employment in the past and present, and requires public and community participation to reveal more of the private and interior landscape of the culture of work through their interaction.

The project utilizes real-time video processing software that allows the computer to generate and control matted (masked) images. The software is able to identify the motion of the passersby, create an outline of their bodies, and replace their bodies with the time-lapse footage. For the light box component of the piece, Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei collaborated with 3-form material solutions and October Ai to construct a sewn map of lower Manhattan depicting the area of Chinatown, while marking places relevant to their research onto bolts of Linea Vert fabric. The fabric was then laid into 3-form material solution’s eco-resin, a specially formulated translucent polyester resin that is environmentally friendly and engineered to incorporate 40% recycled material. The first installation site is at the HSBC facade on Canal Street (58 Bowery Branch). The artists are also planning for other sites in Chinatown for the summer and fall of 2006 to engage different areas, invigorate other public spaces, and ultimately celebrate the people that make Chinatown work.

Exhibited as an exterior projection at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007 for the ‘The Water and Light Project,‘ where designers, architects, artists working with local environment, ambience, architecture and acoustics create a shared experience.

Exhibited at the 4th International Architectural Biennale Ljubljana, Slovenia

Building Asia Brick by Brick: My Ideal City

240 students from 12 primary schools gathered on 11th October 2008 for an educational program, “Building Asia Brick by Brick: My Ideal City” on 46/F, Central Plaza, and built their ideal cities with 100,000 LEGO bricks. The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design were the organizers of the program and the Faculty of Architecture of The University of Hong Kong was the co-organizer. Sponsors of the program include LEGO Hong Kong Ltd., Pacific Coffee Company and Sino Group.

“Building Asia Brick by Brick” is a two-year project initiated in 2007 by Art Asia Pacific (an international magazine) and People’s Architecture (a non-profit organization). Since June 2007 a series of public educational programs have been held in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing to encourage children’s creativity and enhance their awareness of city development. This year Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei of eskyiu organized workshops along with their HKU team teachers and colleagues, collaborated with The Hong Kong Federation of Youth Groups and Hong Kong Ambassadors of Design to introduce this educational project to Hong Kong, encouraging students to learn design concepts of urban cities and raise their awareness of building the city of Hong Kong.

HKU Faculty: Marisa Yiu and Eric Schuldenfrei (co-founders of eskyiu Ltd.)
Ambassadors of Design Hong Kong: Dee Poon and Alan Lo
People’s Architecture: Wei Wei Shannon and Andrew Gluckman
Federation of Youth Groups: Dr. Rossana Wong, Yolanda Chiu, Alice Lui, Anita Lam, Olivia Tang, Wing Shek
Lego: Pater Fung and Yvonne Lam

HKU Professors/Teachers/Participants: Debra Cheung, N Matsuda, Tao Zhu

HKU Alumni and Students workshop teachers:

“Green City”
HKU Members: Stephen Ip (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader), Claire Yuen (M Arch 1 workshop leader), Keith Chan (HKU 2008 Alumnus), Amy Au ( M Arch 2)

“Diversity City”
HKU Members: Jimmy Fung (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader), Ricky Lee (HKU 2008 Alumnus), Denise Lau (M Arch 2), Carmen Chan (BAAS 3)

“Island City”
HKU Members: Sherry Fung (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader),Jane Lui ( M Arch 2), Norman Ung (BAAS 3), Tiffany Leung (BAAS 3), Yannis Chan (M Arch 2)

“Network City”
HKU Members: Brice Wong (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader), Alex Tse (M Arch 1, workshop leader), Tugo Cheng (HKU 2008 Alumnus), Stephanie Cheng (BAAS 3)

“Dense City” major Brick colour: yellow
HKU Members: Ida Kwei (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader), Tony Wong ( M Arch 2), Kenneth Tse (M Arch 2)

“Healthy City”
HKU Members: Liam Li (HKU 2008 Alumnus, workshop leader), Edith Hin and Geri Chan (M Arch 1 workshop leader) (AM+PM), Karen Fung (HKU 2008 Alumnus), Yeung Ho Man Leg (BAAS 3)

Charles Lai (BAAS 3) HKU Student Photographer

animations by eskyiu with Michael Klausmeier, Emmet Truxes, and Daniel Markiewicz