Design Studio (Three) Seven BA Architecture

John Zhang & David Porter

John Zhang is an architect and academic. He runs Studio JZ, was previously an associate at award-winning practice DSDHA, and holds a PhD from the RCA on the topic of contemporary Chinese architecture.

David Porter is an architect, urbanist and educator. He was a partner of David Porter Neave Brown Architects. He was Professor of Architecture at the Central Academy of Fine Art, Beijing (2012-18) and Head of the Mackintosh School of Architecture (2000-11).

DS(3)7: Reimagining Surrogate Spaces

Students: Rahin Ahmed, Samia Ar-Rumi, Kevin Cahani, Katie Chan, Emir Elcin, Mehek Fatima Khan, Francisco Fernandes Badona, Claudia Gomez-Perretta Esparza, Yasmine Houfani, Aniseh Hoveizavi, Ritan Khan, Muhammad Manjra, Jounaid Mungraile, Iliana Pappa, Ceylin Sozer, Nimrah Tariq, Vanessa Yuksel

In DS(3)7, we believe, just like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, it is through the examination of the other, however remote and inaccessible, that we gain a better understanding of the self. We use Beijing as our ‘invisible’ city to explore ideas of living in a global context. Our diverse backgrounds feed a multitudes of Invisible Cities in to our collective perspective on how architecture is made.

This year we explored surrogate spaces in the making of dwellings and communities, where citizens can challenge, subvert and reimagine how they are expected to live their lives. The stage for our investigation this year is the Fusuijing tower in Beijing, an abandoned 1950s housing block in the heart of China’s capital. In Semester 1, each student ‘hacked’ one or many of the building’s modular spaces, originally intended for housing and reimagined, rebuilt and re-occupied it as a surrogate space to provide a communal function for the neighbourhood while facilitating an act of surprise.

In Semester 2, the prototypical surrogate spaces established in Semester 1 developed into a comprehensive and extensive proposal of dwellings and communal programmes for a colony of young people. Students were encouraged to think about their proposal openly and at an urban scale, from a network of surgical acupuncture into the surrounding neighbourhood, to an ambitious reimagining of large structures that could replace the existing tower block. Moving from disrupting a building to reimagining the city, these explorations and interventions straddled the domestic and the public, the normative and the secretive to interrupt, to surprise, and to explore a new way of living.

Guest Critics: John Edwards, Matt Lindsay (Hampshire County Council Architects), Violet Yue Cao