This catalog celebrates the student work developed during the 2012 joint design studio with CAUP / Tongji University, in Shanghai, and displays 16 students team projects with complementary essays. This 9-weeks intense design studio is the core component of SoA-RPI’s China Program, a biannual one-semester immersive cultural and academic exchange program.   >>

“In the laboratory of urbanism that is today’s Chinese city, an architectural hiatus appears between the coarse-grained urban vision of centralized planning and the tangible reality of building and development.  In this chaotic and unexpected gap (…) there is fertile ground and opportunities for new programmatic speculations and architectural tactics.”

Scaling up Semper’s tectonic argument to the urban realm, students were asked to develop affective strategies that interwork programmatic and structural forces within the architectural project. Textile structural systems were intensively researched and explored by both physical and computational means in order to introduce the students to the intelligence embedded on them and understand the techniques for interworking elements.

Faculty: Chen Hong, Wei Wei, Gustavo  Crembil (Coordinator / Editor). Graphic Designer: Michael Villardi