Field Transition

Project Information

Field Transition A Cinema Connecting Commerce & Community from Day to Night

Advisor Liu Yingying

Individual Studio Work

2020 Spring, Chongqing

Introduction

“The Field describes a space of propagation, of effects. It contains no matter or material points, rather functions, vectors and speeds. It describes local relations of difference within fields of celerity, transmission or careering points, in a word, what Minkowski called the world.”

Sanford Kwinter, 1986

“Field Conditions are bottom-up phenomena, defined not by overarching geometrical schemas but by intricate local connections. Interval, repetition and seriality are key concepts. Form matters, but not so much the forms of things as the forms between things.”

Stan Allen, Points + Lines, 1999

[1] Urban Condition in the Field - Deconstruct the Cultural Conflicts of Local Urbanism

As urban condition is one of the most complex systems in the physical world, hidden orders or rules exist under the surface of daily urban transitions. With the study of field, although it is hard to capture every detail elements affecting the urban condition, we can learn from certain urban elements which determine these orders systematically on the macro level. In a short-term behavior such as daily transition, physical built environment is the main factor to construct the urban field and groups of people are the units being affected. In a long-term development, these daily behaviors accumulate and finally turn into a culture, which is actually a field crossing spacetime.

Chinese traditional market is such a kind of fields crossing spacetime, and finally forms a urbanism culture. Along thousands of years, people in the living community have a habit to come to an open space and make trades with each other. Even in today’s Chinese cities, such kinds of space exist in every living communities, keeping forming a field affecting people’s daily life. However, new commercial system has comed since the economy reform from the last century, leading by the supermarkets and retailers, which have their own field and affect the original traditional market field continuously.

Urban fields build people’s daily behavior and life. As the modern field comes in and expand itself constantly, the traditional field, the traditional urbanism culture, is in danger during the urban development. While the modern commercial field is more systematical and efficient, the traditional field is more natural and tightly related to the construction of living community. It is the critical time to protect the old field from being replaced.

[2] Field as a Design Methodology - Reconstruct Transition between Fields in Reality

People don’t feel the urban environment with the macro perspective. The elders in the living community have no experience of the nearby commercial complex and the young people have no idea what the traditional markets like. This project explores how to deconstruct the local condition in a field system, but also how to reconstruct the fields and the transition between fields, the hidden facts, in the reality.

In this process, field is a method both to investigate and design. After field condition is represented in a structural system, this system can be applied directly to the reconstruction design. Within the field system, relationships of the field are able to well reconstructed and showed with a obvious form in the reality, which can be easily perceived by people groups. At the same time, the design is also served as a way to ease the conflicts between two urbanism cultures and give the old field a strong stand to protect it from the new one.