17/06/2024
{Research Field Trip}
To the Himalayas on Vernacular Architecture and Traditional Building Techniques
This summer, we are heading to the Himalayas to learn from local craftsmen about building techniques. From carpenters and stone masons to local architects, we are engaged in conversations, to share knowledge, and discuss traditional construction techniques. As part of our studio research, we aim to improve local construction methods by first understanding and then building upon them. We hope to ensure that traditional crafts and building techniques are revived locally to counter the rapid takeover of reinforced concrete and brick structures. While preserving traditional craftsmanship, we seek to enhance it with considerations for thermal comfort, earthquake-resistant structural stability, and sustainable construction efficiency, thereby upgrading traditional building techniques to meet modern needs.
02/03/2024
{A Huge House III: Indigenous Student Housing}
NIII SPACE teaching @USYD
Master Induction Studio
A Huge House III is a USYD Master Induction Studio taught with Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal of GFA2 Architects. This year, A Huge House III is focused on designing student housing for Indigenous Australians. Students are asked to co-create within the Connecting to Country framework, reimagining the possibilities of sharing daily life together with respect to Indigenous Australian culture and ways of living. In this studio, we are exploring adaptive reuse. Our studio is working with the existing USYD International House building on City Road to propose careful approaches for refurbishment. The projects are articulated through the lens of adaptive reuse, with consideration of sustainable and meaningful interventions.
16/10/2023
{The Naked Room}
NIII SPACE + M.A.C Studio
Teaching Studio 04 @ UTS
At the finale of Coperni’s 2022 Paris Fashion Week Show, Bella Hadid emerges naked on stage with a fine layer of fabricant sprayed on her body. The dress is like another layer of skin perfectly fitted her nude body. Architecture, like fashion, operates as an apparatus of the body - a series of skins, layers, structures, finishes, and ornaments that define the relationship of the body to the climate, social context and cultural milieu. This semester at UTS Studio 04, via the lenses of adaptive reuse, we will ask students to intervene building renovation in a surgical way. Consider carefully the need to remove and the necessity of adding to the existing. The question is how to design the perfect ‘dress' for existing body and how much do you dress it? In the context of of increasing expensive, commercial and atomised student housing in contemporary Sydney, the students are to reconsider the role of student housing as a space of exploration where life, leisure, production, consumption, sleep, work and played are shared to form new modes of domesticity.
01/06/2023
Yunlu House in Construction
Photograph by Enmeng Qiao
Yunlu House is in construction! Demolition is starting on site from June 2023. The project is aiming for completion towards the end of 2024. We are working diligently with lighting consultant, builders, craftsmen and material suppliers to materialise the project. We are grateful for the Yunlu project team and everyone who is working with us to make it happen. More project construction updates will be posted on our instagram moments and website.
02/03/2023
{A Huge House II}
NIII SPACE teaching @USYD
Master Induction Studio
A Huge House II is a USYD Master Induction Studio taught with Guillermo Fernandez-Abascal, GFA2 Architects. The studio considers fundamentally how we live as a collective, a student housing hosting 500 students on the campus of USYD. Student housing is a site of experimentation, where the public ground is crossed over with the private. A house is to be redefined to the contemporary needs of students to sleep, work, play, love and live, urging students to reconsider the student housing as a place of production and a place of domesticity. The studio experiments with the possibilities of collective living by thinking big and small, it puts emphasis on the 1/100 and the 1/20 with typical plan, big models and spatial images. On the basis of the studio, NIII SPACE is interested to work with students in exploration of the ‘deep plan’ in the typical tower design, and the fun alternatives to resolve the issue.