Space Escher

Time
2022-2023

Team
Personal Project

With the development of the Metaverse and other forms of virtual architecture, the architecture has reached a point of losing its limitations: In a virtual space such as the metaverse, or in reality such as outer space, there are no restrictions of gravity and any physical laws appended with it. While all the existing architectural designs still rely on these restrictions, these features propose a highly fundamental question to the architectural study: What might architecture be like without any restrictions? This is such an advanced question that we need to reach out to artists and illusionists for suggestions.

M.C.Escher was a pioneer in such a topic. He was keen on the topic of surrealism and impossible space: The confusing stairs in random directions, the non-Euclidean Penrose triangle, and the self-inducing scenery drawings. Years have passed since he put forward these ideas, and with the help of virtual technology, we found ourselves not only being able to visualize this kind of space, and with the help of VR, we can even experience and live in these spaces. Thus, it becomes inevitable to produce some serious design on the approach of these works.

Borges has put forward the idea of continuous space in his books. An undivided and continuous space will actually create any arrangement for any people in the world. One simple thing to do in such a virtual space is repetition (or random) and infinity. We thus need to make use of this precious material and create practical spaces. With this idea, the architecture should not be specifically designed for a peculiar space, it should have the character of expansion, and it should simply be a texture rather than a space. 

The idea of space is eliminated, texture as the material to expand in the wholeness of virtual space is the answer to a virtual architecture. The main idea of this project is inspired by the impossible space illustrated by Escher and tries to expand it to a 3d space where people could actually live. Given the disappearance of gravity, every direction could be the correct direction of living. Thus, I used computer-generated design to visualize the possibility of such a space, in which the elements that we rely on in everyday-living, bed, chair, walls—are completely disrupted and rearranged in peculiar orders, and that people living in these spaces can fully explore and try the highest capacity of the space they live in in a 3-dimentional manner.















Contact

Email: yuhan_wang@gsd.harvard.edu
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuhan-wang-095874264