Zihao Weng

In this term, he focused more on the high density of urbanisation, because the cities are fragile in facing COVID-19 and other potential pandemics. Especially in the Tapin community. The outside environment, like the climate and pandemic changes, force the architectural types to be functionally changing, but how to make the changes more acceptable for the residents in their community and easy for government to implement is what I was concerned about and did. The parasitic architecture utilised the facade and split the ground floor public space into various small groups rearranged in the vertical space, which actually expanded the limited living space and bridged the connection among neighbours. Although the restructure of old residential buildings is a comparatively narrowed way to contribute, the process of research made me understand the development of housing types is the miniature urbanisation, and how the design strategy or architecture types are shaped by the national political and economic directions in that moment. His project is to reconstruct aged buildings based on the COVID-19 situation. The first reason he chose aged housing in the Tapin community in Chongqing, is that the residents here consist of seniors and marginalised people who are living in poverty, they are the most fragile group in facing this global pandemic. And according to the research of the history of these buildings, it was built over 20 years, which means the community’s facilities and infrastructures are not sufficient for long-term safe quarantine. The third reason is that, in a time of quarantine, people are living in the non-social communication situation. Some residents felt stress and depression due to social distancing, some even had mental issues in long-term quarantine, spent with little communication. So compared to the slow process of change in housing architectural types in China, the pragmatic way is to restructure this housing for uncertainties such as pandemics in future.