U R B A N   T I M E L A P S E

Celebration of Redundancy through Slow Demolition

The Consumerist culture of our generation has result in an excessive waste in architecture material and lost of personal identity.  In light of this, the project proposes an alternative methodology towards the destruction phenomenon that occurred alongside rapid globalisation. Through searching the cultural identity of local residents, the design subverts the traditional understanding of ‘ruin’ and adaptively reuses the disused Silos in Capital Steel and Iron Complex - the largest industrial brownfield - in Beijing. The project’s timeline has divided into a series of acts reacting to the slow demolition of the coking plant. While the site just started to be demolished in reality, the project preserves the spiritual integrity of the site by recording of imagery and sounds followed with experiments to of digital archive. Weak intervention was proposed initially with installations consists of kinetic apparatus, transforming the derelict interior into a space that interactive to participants. Through interweaving the decaying architecture and reoccupying nature into a symbiocene, it celebrates the process of space evolving throughout time, acting never as a finished piece but a continuous flux responsive to its surrounding.The site is particularly personal due to my past memory with family’s senior who dedicated life at the complex. This raise the propsoal onto a memorial level, taking the life cycle of nature as a metaphor, the disused site is brought to life through the program of museum park. To protect the historical heritage of the site, identifiable features such as the cooling tanks are preserved at a memorial level. By separating and relocating the existing, a space of enclosure has turned into a museum park. Ultimately, the polluted site is returned harmlessly to nature, contributing to industrial protection, merging into a part of local ecosystem.