By Yao Lan, Junior Project Manager - Art-Science
On July 18th, swissnex China was honored to present a very inspiring event with two ETH Zürich Alumni, Dr. Yifan Wang and Prof. Hao Hua from Southeast University, who gave us a glance at two interdisciplinary research fields of architecture studies.
During the lecture, Dr. Wang shared with the audience her research project about the genius Zayton (Quanzhou) with the architectural anthropological critiques. With reflectively thinking about the space, she mentioned the concept of ‘genius loci’ in global architecture history, explained the traces of a spatial concept that essentially has interacted with Chinese people for a long time.
The second part of this event is about how computational design and digital fabrication rationalize the architectural design as well as cultivate new imaginations. Prof. Hua regarded the mathematics, especially Descartes’s coordinate system, as a new-old method for design of not only architecture, but also artifacts and sculptures. Based on this insight, he introduced the software that he used for coding infinite series of products.
It feels like an adventure through the history of architecture in Dr. Yifan Wang’s presentation while Dr. Hao Hua’s talk was about looking into the next era. Combining the past with the future, both presentations have motivated the audience to re-think about architecture. After the insightful dialogue between both speakers and the active Q&A session, the audience continued discussions with the two Swiss linked researchers during the networking reception.
