suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.
xiaofeng MEI & xiaotian GAO: Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Based on Bionics — The concept of this design based on the deconstruction and restructuring of Bionics as well as the supernatural spirit of the church’s design review.
The idea is based on two starting levels and extraction elements. One is the derivative and evolution of fish’s bone and texture. Specifically, from fish bones, fish gills, fish suko, and other various important parts, I can extract the geometric elements and then sort out the logic of formation of biological body, which would become the primitive of main structure and mode. Second is the religious beliefs of church and spiritual of space.
The exploration of the spirit of building is the basic method and necessary mean to study how to combine the modern architecture and ultra-modern architecture together.
In my studying process, I always explore to the future building appearance, unknown aesthetic, the core ideas and logic beyond the building itself. External prosperity of Architectural appearance, but in fact, requires careful logical constitute of inherent physical units to support. In this project, I mainly studied the formation and variation of single cells as well as a series of gradually combined into a system derived from logic. At all stages, a power expansion of the complexity has been formed from the body itself, the logic of variation and composition. Meanwhile, I also sought to control the hierarchy of overall complexity and coherence in order to achieve complicated and orderly aesthetic coexistence of interaction scenarios. This is the original intention of bionics or architectural aesthetics that are tending to nature because nature is the most complex biological interpretation of synthetic organisms.
At any one area, theory would be far beyond the practice, which is the prerequisite for everything to constantly update and evolve, also in the architecture field. The imagination of future architecture and utopian city continued to the present from the last century. Here, the architecture abandoned the totalitarian and inherit the anti-totalitarian utopian tendencies, focusing on the nature and the spirit of liberalism.
sP: What or who influenced this project?
xM & xG: Religious, Catholic, Alien (film), The Thing (film), H. R. Giger, Hernan Diaz Alonso, Zaha Hadid.
sP; What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?:
xM & xG: Underworld III and District 9.
sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?:
xM & xG: Hernan Diaz ALONSO, HR Giger, Kris Kuksi.