CYBER ARENA

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutors Pierandrea Angius

Team Yingrui Xu, Andong Wang, Yiyang Zheng, Wei Peng

The massive effects of Covid-19 pandemic on our society have triggered our research and design of a new generation of incubators. Communication and collaboration have moved into the digital domain utilising platforms like Zoom; formal events must now be scheduled following a specific protocol, while the opportunities for unexpected, informal encounters are lost. We propose to bridge the physical realm with virtual interaction through an architectural design that fully meets the requirements for different degrees of mixed meetings and events.

 We believe that all of us have been through a tough year during the pandemic period: we were asked to follow the lockdown rules, to keep social distancing, while often we had to work from home. We now spend most of our time facing digital devices to meet our colleagues and teammates online rather than go to work physically. Naturally, this has challenged our traditional modes of working. Those new ways of encounter bring us the virtual world. New technologies have been developed in response to this demand, and most have been used widely especially in the urban incubator.

 The users of our project are the people who join the space physically, people working at home or any other remote participants. Our project proposes this new cyber space to function as a technology centre where we have deep spaces, strong visibility, dynamic interactions, through a system of mobile furniture in a kind of hybrid field condition. Cyber Arena is a place where people come to meet but also compete; cyber space also brings innovation and productive coexistence. By collecting a series of cyber space components such us colour gradience, navigation signs, boundaries, and fields, we can organise them all by three categories – physical, virtual and hybrid – and together these can construct the space of Cyber Arena.