3. EXP: 0/0/0
Ruinophilia & The Off-Modern Ruin: Chinatown Portsmouth Square Studio collab. with Hue Bui (UC Berkeley, 2023)
Instructors: Lyndon Neri + Rossana Hu, Christina Cho Yoo
* Awarded Design Process Award
Top: CNC poplar site model.
Left: Sketch of elevations for Portsmouth Square. Right: 3D printed final square design.
Studio Brief:
The studio referred to Svetlana Boym who suggests “off-modern” relationships between preservation and development, advocating for designers to engage with traces of the past - past authors, builders, failed projects, and revealing the traces of non-realized compositions. The studio took on Boym’s ruinophilia and pentimenti in the context of the historical legacy of Chinatown San Francisco. In addressing the off-modern, it also borrowed from the notion of the monument put forth by Aldo Rossi, who conceived the city as a living entity, constantly transforming and accumulating its own consciousness and memory. Rossi argued that architecture’s value resides within the forms of urban artifacts, which continue to structure the city even after they have shed their functions. To expand upon Rossi’s theoretical framework, students were encouraged to investigate how notions of ruinophilia in eastern thinking can provide new design strategies for adaptive reuse. The design intervention entailed redesigning Portsmouth Square along with the adjacent brutalist Hilton Hotel tower to accomodate multi-generational users, locals, and tourists.
Response: San Francisco’s Chinatown enclave serves a largely senior population with many congregating in Portsmouth Square during the day. Through research, we found that senior Chinatown residents prefer not to move out of Chinatown to more suburban areas to be taken care of when they grow old, mainly due to language barriers and access to social, emotional and cultural exchanges they so readily experience in the city. Since our site is a Naturally Occurring Retirement Community (NORC), we find it relevant to focus on aging in place. In order to privilege, the elderly our design decisions mediate accessibility, autonomy, and social interaction. With an underlying understanding that “aging” does not equal “expiring”, we aim to answer: how can this given site’s infrastructure better host its aging in place community?
