No-Stop City
Made: 2020 Feb~Jun
Personal Work
Covered @Dutch Design Week 2020
Introduction:
The only way we can keep exploring is to never stop creating new space.
In this interactive digital art, you hop on a virtual 2D and 3D journey to a city called No Stop City”. This project is an homage to Archizoom Associati (1966-1974), an Italian architectural and design studio.
1. How it works
2. Inspiration & Reflection
Original Work by Archizoom:
Architectural Drawings from the Archizoom’s project:
I got immersed into 'No-Stop City' project by group Archizoom. They changed the most artificial, consumeristic spaces into a place of 'survival' by making them into a camper and placing mountains inside. This made me imagine dwelling in this camp during an apocalypse, which has an eerily similar feeling with current situation, Covid-19 pandemic.
For Andrea Branzi, a member of the Archizoom, "No-Stop City is a critical utopia founded on a realistic vision of the world, where design is intended to be the fundamental conceptual tool for modifying lifestyles and territory."
This gave me inspiration of creating an virtual environment. I wanted to give different ways of 'exploring' the space, while ultimately they're all executed on a flat computer monitor. And inherit the idea that Archizoom tried to get across, but give a 'virtual' twist on that.
After building this, I made people play around with it. People asked questions like if they can walk around this 3D space, or which places the 2D blueprint represents of.
I realized and learned that 3D and 2D spaces filter different informations to people, and make them notice different features of the space that the person is placed in. For 3D space they mainly commented about the interactivity or the appearances. For 2D space, they commented mostly on relationships to each objects and the proportions among spaces. Regardless, giving different modality helped them people imagine the space more easily.
3. Develop
INTRO
To give more immersive experience, I made an interactive storytelling section in the intro. I used a quote from Archizoom as a story to explain what their idea behind this was about.
2D SPACE
3D SPACE
I made this graphic, inspired by original blueprint sketches. I wanted to elevate the feeling of ‘exploring’ this space, so I let people turn the light on in this artificial space, and make them leave traces of letters when they move around this place with their mouse pressed.
When I imagine this city, it’s highly sterile, and is somewhat out of the normal rules, such as gravity. I imagined outside this ‘city’ which is built entirely indoor, will be full of asteroids floating and roaming around this space. This elevates the feeling of sterile, ambient atmosphere.
