[symbios]City

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutors Pierandrea Angius 

Team Pengcheng Gu, Hao Wen, Yuchao Zhang, Shuai Zou

SymbioCity aims to create an assemblage of social ecologies through a rich but cohesive multi-authored urban district. The primary ambition is to generate an urban area with a characterful, varied identity, that achieves a balanced order between unity and difference avoiding both the sterile and disorienting monotony of centrally planned modernist cities and the (equally disorienting) visual chaos of an agglomeration of utterly unrelated interventions as we find now frequently.

Through a thorough research process, our project evolves mainly out of three principles that are taken into consideration for the development of our project: topological optimisation, phenomenology, and ecology. By “ecology”, we understand a living network of information exchange. Therefore, every strategy we employ is not merely about reacting to the weather conditions, but instead it is an inquiry into the various ways we can exploit the latter, a translation of the weather conditions into spatial and programmatic properties.

The SymbioCity’s proposal adopts these three principles in several aspects of the design. The ground topography is generated by hydraulic patterns based on the natural river flow and changes its connectivity in reaction to the rising of the water level. The platforms, as another iteration of the same hydraulic pattern, interface between the tower volumes the ground circulation. The skyscrapers are clustered based on the performative qualities of the topological optimisation and material explorations and provide flexible zoning opportunities and coreless programmatic distributions. Finally, the design of the kinetic façade is optimised based on a series of sunlight studies, differentiating the articulation of any south-facing and north-facing openings.  

SymbioCity therefore aims at developing a multi-authored urban area with a rich identity that achieves a balance between the various elements. SymbioCity began formally from topological optimisation, developed based on studies on ecology, and concluded the design following our phenomenological explorations, overall aiming at a complex design project that unifies the perception of all scales of design: from the platform to the towers.