OSO Penguin Park                   The Blurred Boundary Between Ecologies       

 


Date Fall 2021
Location Nanjing, China
Instructor Ziyue Liu, SANAA
Collaborator Yaqi Zhang, Weiwei Lei
Award Bronze Prize / 2022 Asian Design Award
Exhibition 2022 Shenzhen + Hong Kong Urbanism/Architecture Bi-City Biennalé 

The abstract of this studio was to propose a new animal enclosure for the Hongshan Zoo in Nanjing, which itself is a segmented piece of nature in the heart of the city. We chose the Mangelic penguins as we were intrigued by the parallel between how they traverse sociologically between amphibian habitats and how humans occupy the cityscape to recreate and work. Given that the site parcel is an edge condition between the city and nature, we wanted to leverage it as an interface of interhuman, interspecies, and interurban transactions. Schematically, the project serves as a tangential line that bifurcates the 2 penguin habitats where human programs occur. These pathways delayer into ann enclosed route for the zoo and a route that bleeds back out into the city, linking the station, the zoo, and the new plaza/mall complex. The boundaries modulate to allow for ambiguity between human and nature, with a bridge that literally links the 2 penguin habitats transgressing an amphitheater, allowing for the daily ritual of migration to devolve into a spectacle for human (and in a more morbid criticality, for penguin) consumption. Pockets of interior programs and sunken courtyards also provide nodes for collectivity, as well as vertical circulation that punctuate moments of sporadic entry and exit points between the zoo and urban routes.

The project began with a parallel research studies on issues of boundary and conventional zoos as a typology. Regarding the manifestation of ‘boundaries’, we were interested in the articulation of division, fusion, movement, action, and ‘emotion’ as critical points of integration and diffusion. We attempted at a model that explored how depth of field, blurriness, and self-cognition can affect the perception (and self-perception) of how mutual autonomy can be signaled through visibility and range. We produced a topographic arrangement by studying the ‘aura’ spheres generated by natural and artificial elements in traditional Chinese gardens and applied this metric onto a continuous field condition. In a more critical and cynical study of zoos as a typology, we were interested in the simulacra of constructed natural conditions as spaces for animals when compared to its function as a space for humans. The feedback loops generated instigate issues of subject/object, body/mind, homogenous/heterogenous, which are issues that should be addressed or challenged in the design of zoos as an expression of infinite anthropocentric interiors.