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House for Nana

“The (heterogeneous) relation is the smallest unit of analysis, and the relation is about significant otherness at every scale.” ─ Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003)

Because of the unimaginably harsh world into which Nana was born, she tended to keep a certain distance from humans when she first joined our family. I wanted to create a shelter where Nana can feel safe at home, although her curiosity toward the world should not be sacrificed. Lastly, I wanted the house can be assembled, disassembled without too much effort.

The house consists of 3/4" birch plywood boards, wood square dowels, and metal door hinges. These are all common construction materials. The plywood boards provide a sense of security, like a roof, while the wood dowels act as tension members and become the threshold between the interior and exterior. The door hinges are now pin connectors of the roof, which allows the house to be folded into two stacked boards, and unexpectedly leaves a seam of light into the house.

House for Nana is an atypical architectural exercise started solely from the speculations and observations of our dear companion's everyday behaviors, then attempts to communicate with her by means of scales, forms, and spaces. It is a bridge in between our heterogeneous relationship. Because of this translation in scales and difference of bodies, the functions of things incongruently deform and, therefore, may create new meanings for both of us.

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Chung-Wei Lee, House for Nana (2019)

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Chung-Wei Lee, House for Nana (2019)  Illustration by Chen-An Huang

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Chung-Wei Lee, House for Nana (2019) Photography by Chen-An Huang

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Chung-Wei Lee, House for Nana (2019) Photography by Chen-An Huang

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Chung-Wei Lee, House for Nana (2019) Photography by Chen-An Huang

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On Museo Jumex

2019.09

Museo Jumex looks like an introvert, if not a defensive fort, compared to the upscale and lavish neighborhood of Polanco surrounding it. We arrived at the building after passing through the travertine threshold that rose from the ground floor and hung from the ceiling. Guided by the staff, we entered the elevator and wandered through the white galleries on the top two levels. There were no windows, except for the filtered white skylights. It was austere and lifeless. Finally, we went down to the second floor, which was a roughly 30 ft high, floor-to-ceiling glass box, surrounded by terraces and four substantial openings on the museum’s travertine facade.

These openings resembled theater screens in size and proportion, which abruptly revealed the surrounding glass-clad shopping malls, luxury condo units, and some advertising walls, which targeted the guests of the museum ...more

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From Spatial Reading to Spatial Practice

閱讀然後建築  2016.10

起點

如要試著從留學來談我自身追尋建築的軌 跡，我想要從起點開始。我十歲時隨著家人從淡 水近郊的小社區中，搬到活絡的板橋市區裡。我 因此第一次有了在大城市中生活、獨自流連的經驗，體驗到生活環境中人與空間之複雜性，超出 自己可以掌握的程度。在城市裡的日常生活，即是去習慣與擁抱這無法預期和掌控的生活樣貌， 城市裡的人不再只有我過去所熟悉的語言與行為 模式，相反地，充滿不同階層與文化的並置碰撞。街道上早餐推車與傍晚各種小吃攤販早午晚 接替著、隨著日子汰換，家附近的巷道不會有盡頭，而是無止境的連綿下去⋯。

空間的可能性、複雜性與危機

Henri Lefebvre認為（社會）空間是（社會的） 生產物。它並不僅是幾何意義上的虛空間 (empty space)，也是萬物與時間、地理、意識產生連結的媒介 ...more

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Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools

Sahel Region, Africa

Leonardo Da Vinci called clouds “bodies without surface [1].” They are seen as entities but they are actually groups of countless tiny particles. Clouds emerge without any omen, drift with winds, and disappear. Consequently, human beings usually perceive clouds as something intangible in the air, but in fact clouds come from the ground. The atmosphere, the composition of the air, the type of land cover, and even the human activity configure the shapes and movements of clouds. We all know that the weather and the clouds critically affect our living environments, but we should also keep in mind that “humankind modifies the weather and climate, whether we know it or not [2]”, as Harry Wexler, the head of meteorological research at the U.S. Weather Bureau, reminded other meteorologists in a 1962 speech.

The aim of this design-research project is to attempt to capture the clouds. The invention of satellites and other modern technologies have enabled us to understand more about the capricious clouds through monitoring and research, but we have not yet fully explored the potential of our understanding of nature. By looking at environmental phenomena and different forces that perturb or correlate with each other, the consequences of weather modification and landscape manipulation might be gradually understood. If clouds come from the ground, maybe the marvels of clouds could be literally “built.“ 

The project attempts to identify the factors that change clouds, examine the consequences of different actions, and, importantly, to rethink the environmental manipulation and the overall outcomes it would bring. It reveals the possibility that the built environment, the artifact of human beings, could play an active role within the natural system. And, if we can build clouds and storms, do we have sufficient reason to create them? Can we foresee the consequences of our godlike operations on this extremely complicated global climate and the local ecology?

The design-research project focuses on the Sahel region, which is a grassland belt that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, located between the vast, dry Sahara desert and the wet tropical rain forest. Its savannah ecosystem and agriculture activities, the region’s most important industry, depend mainly on the precarious rainfall. Because of this, the Sahel region is permanently threatened by food insecurity and desertification on the south Sahara fringe.

In 2011, a meteorologist at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Christopher Taylor, and his colleagues published an article revealing that the patterns of soil moisture in Sahel have a significant correlation with Sahelian storm initiation [2]. Taylor et al. noted, “Evapotranspiration of soil moisture can affect temperature and humidity in the lower atmosphere and thereby the development of convective rainstorms.” The violent sunlight, the rarity of high woods, and the flatness of the landscape allow soil moisture patterns to trigger ground winds that favor the development of convective cumulus clouds⎯the cardinal engine that brings water vapors up to the air and forms different kinds of clouds and rainfall. According to Taylor, the probability of convective initiation of storms over Sahel is twice as high above the strong soil moisture gradients than it is above uniform soils.

Following the research, another critical inspiration for the project is the essence of the gigantic transboundary fossil aquifer system⎯one of the world’s largest groundwater systems⎯that lies beneath the sandstone stratum covering the Sahara and Sahel. Most of these aquifers were recharged 5,000 years ago when the climate of the area was as wet as a tropical area. The groundwater storage volumes of these areas can be as high as the volume of water of 75 meters depth [4].

In this hypothetical project, a new type of pivot irrigation system is proposed to re-activate the water cycle over the Sahel region. Instead of imprudently pumping water up from the aquifer for irrigation in the traditional way, the new pivot irrigation system is a literal “cloud machine” that captures water vapor and triggers the formation of rainstorms. By tracking the patterns of wind, humidity, and temperature and regulating the irrigation time, the system creates drastic gradients of soil moisture pattern. When the sun drives evaporation from an irrigated area with humid soil, a field of unbalanced temperature and humidity is formed. The disequilibrium can catalyze the formation of up currents of air over the hotter and dryer area that suck water vapor from the surrounding lands and transform this into cumulus cloud systems. Their rainfall will eventually balance the manipulated disequilibrium of air and bring the water back to the land again.

If the scope is broadened to a regional scale, these artificial patterns of soil moisture not only efficiently utilize the water vapor from the croplands’ evapotranspiration but also capture the moisture brought by the northeast wind from the southern tropical forests, not letting them be blown into the vast and dry Sahara desert. It is a system that initiates a vertical circulation of moisture and water from underground to the air over the dry Sahel region. The cloud-building engine is an environment transformational tool that not only cultivates clouds and crops, but also afforests the endangered fringe between the Sahel region and the Sahara desert.

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Hubert Damisch, “The Power of the Continuum,” in A Theory of /Cloud/, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) p.141

James R. Fleming, “The Climate Engineers,” in Willson Quarterly, Spring 2007 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)

C M Taylor, A Gounou, F Guichard, P P Harris, R J Ellis, F Couvreux, M De Kauwe, “Frequency of Sahelian storm initiation enhanced over mesoscale soil-moisture patterns,” in Nature Geoscience 4, 2011 (London: Nature Publishing Group) p.430-433

A M MacDonald, H C Bonsor, B E´ O´ Dochartaigh and R G Taylor, “Quantitative maps of groundwater resources in Africa,” in Environmental Research Letters Volume 7, Number 2 (Bristol: IOP Publishing)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)

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Chung-Wei Lee, Clouds as Environment Transformational Tools (2013)