Rational Form Making
Nature provides clues on how to build. When we make buildings, we must address forces of nature – material, gravity, seismic, and wind. Nature’s rules are the most honest framework of all.
This interest is the basis of PangArchitect’s research and built works. Rational Form Making – an ongoing research project that started over a decade ago – is to construct through understanding the purest set of objectivities based on nature’s willfulness. This lineage of thought can be traced back to the simple chain model that Robert Hooke made to discover the catenary curve (1675). Architects and engineers from Antoni Gaudí’s hanging model for Sagrada Familia (1889), Félix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloids (1957), Heinz Isler’s new shell forms (1959), and Frei Otto’s soap surface efficiency (1961) demonstrate shared goals to find new forms through play, mathematics, and nature. Our research project, Rational Form Making, is based on the same ethical critique – to find logic and optimization in architectural formal and spatial wonders and discoveries.
The method our office works is to learn through experimentation and to apply lessons we have learned to our built works. Exhibiting here are the recently completed New Asia College dormitory and the University library at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University Library, the Lingnan University library, and a series of experiments we have designed using the same research principles. Most recent is a pair of experiments for two future projects to be completed: a complex shell canopy made of a single module for a kindergarten in Hong Kong that was first exhibited at the Aedas Architecture Forum in Berlin; and this installation of pavilions made of sheet material for an info box design at a public pier in Hong Kong currently exhibiting here at the Francis Loeb Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
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