Yi Zhang

Sporadic Ecoloiges

Architectural and Urban Design - MSc

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

arzhangyi@126.com

2021-2022 design archive

Project description

The everyday dining table is an index of the multiple urban ecologies. Through the table, the project analyses the para-situation of Edinburgh. The table indexes the potential crisis of Edinburgh’s food ecology in the face of excessive food miles. In past urban practice, a series of public spaces in the Old Town, mainly Geddes Garden, have been used as typical examples to alleviate historical population booms and food shortages. The Geddes Garden has also been used as a pilot in modern urban planning to construct autonomous public gardening projects.

To deal with the weak food situation, the project reconstructs a dining table in the Geddes garden - a community food project. The dialectical relationship between the table and the garden will be extended into an applied urban scale design. The methodology is a medium between the abstract and the physical space, which creates the productive landscape. Design at different scales helps to build a new healthy food ecology in Edinburgh.

Sporadic ecologies seek to test the potential of Edinburgh’s food ecology situation in an architectural and urban design context. It is rooted in social life and reconfigures the city’s autonomous food production and energy cycles. The rhizomatic productive landscape that arises from Agency creates enzymatic urbanisms that generate in the loving metropolitan landscape. It promotes a symbiotic relationship between people and the city, generating its model in a more extensive metropolitan network and creating a flexible, sustainable, healthy urban ecology.

The Loving Metropolitant Landscape

Sporadic Ecologies_Film

The group drawing process aims to visualise the tangible interactions, designed as equal actions to actual movements. This method bridges an interpretation of the dining table and presents a vision of architectural and urban design. Essentially, this approach reveals the gesture of the dining table and enables access to the further application.

The drawing was form by four people and presents four “ecologies”. Using tracing paper as a table cloth and redrawing the dinner table provides a vision from objects to relations. Four group members draw a table at the same time and respond to the process of having dinner. The method of social drawing can be applied to different scales of graphic language, including the reproduction of existing facts and the design of new things. This approach unpacks the gesture of the dining table and can be developed into a parallel design process, becoming fundamental to developing the project’s architectural language.

social drawing 01_the dining table

social drawing 02_section

social drawing 03_plan

The Agency is defined as a community food project situated in Geddes Garden as a productive landscape. FABB operates based on the quantification of food production needs and provides an input and output chain to support the energy cycle.

The Butt in FABB operates as a virtual node in the water cycle and as a renewable energy city device in the Agency. It will represent an understanding of the Urban Apparatus for the retention and redistribution of urban wetness.

FABB Agency_Section_BLG

Within the garden_Capricci01

The core functionality of Butt comes from the dining table’s Waste. Butt act as the apparatus of a sustainable energy cycle system. It is situated in the lowest part of the site, with water seeping through the roof and floor into the Butt. The grey water and recyclable waste are purified through cascading purification units. The energy generated by the recycling is redistributed to the system to the maximum extent possible. As a centre for the recovery and redistribution of energy, the Butt controls the rhythm of the water, considering the harmonious relationship between input and output from an institutional and systemic point of view.

[FABB_Butt]_explode isometric_BLG Scale

Section01_BLG

Section04_BLG

Section03_BLG

Section02_BLG

Section06_BDY

Section05_BLG&SET

Agencies with posibility_SET scale

The concept of Butt’s design is to be a plug-in for the city. It is designed to add a layer of filtration and purification to the city. For this project, the building was converted from a group of old buildings by Geddes Garden, retaining necessary materials and structures from the old buildings. At the same time, the closed form of the old buildings is broken up so that the Geddes Garden grows into the building, allowing the plants to live in symbiosis with the building. Water flows through the building under specific control and guidance.

crossing the wetness_Capricci02

The table is an abstract metaphor for the city, an archive and index of urban ecology. The dining table is a widespread and enduring moment of human life, and the health of the food ecology is the basis for sustainable urban development. Community food projects based on urban green spaces develop sporadically in the city, weaving a network of productive landscapes at the urban scale, combining ecological urbanism and weak urbanism to form a new sporadic urban paradigm. The sporadic ecological context of the architecture and urban design will strongly support a healthy and sustainable urban ecology, generating positive developments in the civic society.