Titi Fang
About
Titi completed her bachelor’s degree of Architecture at the University of Nottingham's Ningbo Campus. Before her part 2 study at RCA, she had 4 years’ experience working in the Chongqing, China Office of aLL Design led by late Will Alsop. During this time, she had the chance to participate in projects of various scales, which enhanced her design thinking by different ways of exploring ideas like painting, sketching, reading and communicating with people.
Growing up in China, Titi is particularly interested in the change of the living environment, and how memories are traced in these movements. In the recent decades of China, large numbers of buildings in the cities are demolished, renovated, or regenerated while many villages in rural areas are left derelict. Titi pays much attention to these vanishing and emerging places, and their relation to the existing terrain, historical and social environment. She likes to explore ways of interpreting a comprehensive and sensible narrative in contemporary construction while enhancing people’s experiences, using architectural materials and technologies, and tries to achieve it in real conditions economically.
Statement
As the mass-production industry predominates the metropolitan society, there is a distinct division between human being and the terrain so that some people are still trying to avoid these conflicts and denying the existence the of the crisis. In this year’s research project, the primitive as a media interrogates and punctuates the super-sealed living environment, built under the mass production industry that fossilizing the relation between human and nature, paralysing our sensibility and consciousness.
Hence, the material and precedent research and the design project tries to find answers for the following questions: How can we inhabit the terrain lightly? How can we construct without a heavy impact on the landscape? How can we build without a super-sealed shell? How can we enhance our living environment and spatial experiences without a heavy burden from the construction cost?
It is a negotiation between human construction and the natural landscape, therefore, the Lea Valley cutting through the metropolitan city provides an edge condition between natural features and human traces, and this led to a more specific research question: How to enhance the experience of Lea Valley, a place with rich landscape and trace of history, with light structures and minimal materials that conserves the landscape and leaves a strong connection between constructed interior space and the external terrain?
The Light Shells along the Lea Valley
The project creates a series of ‘Light Shells' sitting on the landscape of the Lea Valley. They provide space for human activities with minimal constructed architectural form that lightly touches the terrain. The primitive tent-like architectural interventions tries to explore the relation between human and nature that enhances our sensibility and empathy towards a larger environment.
With a mixture of rich natural features and historical human traces, Lea Valley provide an edge condition to renegotiate the relation between human construction and natural landscape. It was once home to a diverse range of industries, gravel pits, waterworks sites and factories, but had been neglected and derelict for years and is now turned in to a linear park. There are thousands of people living on the edge of the lea valley. Some live in the adjacent residential council communities, some live a nomadic but vibrant life on the boats along the canals.
Therefore, the project aims at enhancing the experience of inhabiting the Lea Valley, using light structures and minimal materials, conserving the landscape, and maintaining a strong connection between constructed interior space and the external terrain. On the eight selected site, eight light shells spread like pinpoints on the different part of the Lea Valley. They vary in different scales and respond subtly to the historical and physical landscape of each place. Some interventions are tiny such as Warm Booths, a series of tiny cylinders standing along the Chingford Reservoirs, providing cosy stops for visitors walking through the Lea Valley. Some are of local infrastructure scale such as the wild swimming shed, a roof structure suspends above the center of the original plan of the Essex No1 Filterbed, that tries to bring back the historical feature of the waterworks while enhancing the experience for local communities. However, there is also intervention of much bigger scale. The urban curtain is a 1.5km-long, 18m-high aluminium mesh spreads between the largest waste incinerator in UK and the canal community, forming a skeleton for vine plants to climb up that could block the view to the factory while absorb certain amount of the pollution. All of them present a lighter possibility of anchoring human activities to the terrain instead heavy constructions and excessive material consumption.
Medium: architectural drawing, digital painting, video
Drawing Archive
All the interventions use steel structure as the skeleton, some in the form of frame structure, some utilise tension structure consisting of tubular steel columns and steel cables. The architecture enclosure was composed of layers of light materials such as PVC-PES fabric, polycarbonate panels and bioplastics with a translucent or white texture that integrates well in the natural terrain and have a subtle reflection of the surrounding landscape. Another layer is the interior curtains or moving wall panels that function as adjustable space divider or building façade
Medium: Architectural Drawings
Research: Tent Like Architectures
As part of the Live Project, a series of architectures in certain forms of cave and tent are collected through redrawing of the precedents and an archive making. This collection contains five tent-like precedents that explores the possible thin thresholds between interior and exterior.
Medium: Architectural Drawings