Meditation path

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Project in collaboration with Maria Anishchenko and Chao Zheng

In the context of the small island of Inujima in Japan, a formerly industrial island that is currently inhabited by only 55 locals, the project aims at reintroducing it to potential visitors, as well as providing a link between them and the locals. 

This is done by proposing a meditation path along the highest points of the island, that are largely unexplored due to the concentration of tourists on the coast. The path trajectory goes through the woods of the inland, but it also integrates the quarries of stone that have turned into lakes, thus bridging natural and man-made landscapes. 

The project is organised by a single continuous opaque wall from the beginning till the end, which guides the visitor’s attention to the desired landscape by switching between the forest and breathtaking views of the lakes and sea. Three closed buildings are integrated within the path, designed as stops for the visitors.

Project in collaboration with Erik Zanetti, Shuwei Zhang and Hilde Rosenboom 

The challenge proposed by Hyperbody studio was to completely rethink  a student housing facility to be placed near campus in Delft, mainly by integrating it with design-to-robotic production. 

The project proposal focuses on user-oriented adaptability and transforms the student residence in a living organism that constantly changes, based on feedback from research done by using the approach of design thinking. 

A modular approach is used to tackle the complexity, thus a unit of three rooms is replicated throughout the entire area. Every room has walls that can be moved to five different configurations just by pressing a button, depending on the level of privacy the student desires. This translates into 21 total scenarios per unit. 

Walls are composed of a skin with varied transparency and a 3D-printed skeleton. The latter has a parametrically designed auxetic pattern that is crucial to guide the deformation of the wall as it moves.

Project in collaboration with Gabriella Rossi and Mikhail Borushko 

In the light of the Milano Animal City theme, this project applies town planning in a non-anthropocentric way in order to improve the city’s biodiversity and ecosystem. 

The project proposes using gaps on top of supermarkets, which are currently dead spaces in the city, to host structures that could potentially be used as nests from a variety of animals. In order to attract the animals to the gaps, a cart of food that is furnished from leftovers of the supermarket was thought to travel in a spiral through the space, thus also tackling the problem of waste. 

Two solutions were explored for different contexts, a bridge for used terraces and a basket for unused terraces, to be replicated in the whole city. The shapes were computationally designed based on aerodynamic wind simulations, in order to provide a better environment for the animals inside the structures. The intended material is recycled cardboard, in the form of tubes.