CITY AS A MOUNTAIN

“The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

The project speculates the possibility of condensing a large urban development (a science museum) into a singular built form. It is a practice of getting inspiration from canonical buildings and their architects’ styles while avoiding naïve plagiarism of intellectual properties. It builds up upon Roland Barthes’ notion that unity and originality of work lie not in its origin but in its destination. The Mountain as A City is a new reading of Zaha Hadid’ Peak Leisure Club inspirations in order to reborn a whole new project. The aim is to be able to see the reminiscence of the original author while there must not be any apparent signifier of it. Essentially, the building consists of three hierarchies. The Mass, ornamental surface articulations and Materiality.

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The mass compromise of a pyramid and a stack of horizontal towers with two levels of abstractions, one that is purely abstract and “non-objective”, the other that is the abstract of the real. The pyramid core is envisioned metaphorically as a medium for the transformation of science. It operates as a prism inviting at one side, the horizontal towers as interior space, and use their same solid mass to cut-out voids for exterior space at the other side of the pyramid. This also reverses the mass/void relationship in the archaic pyramids. The surface ornaments are taken from the middle eastern endorsement of geometrical patterns found in both calligraphy and Persian carpets. The materiality part of the project is intended to mesh with context, of what would resemble mountain-like tectonics.