Spatial Fabulations & Other Tales of Representation in VR

Design Studio - Postgraduate Master Students at SAC

Spatial Fabulations and Other Tales of Representation in Virtual Reality comprises of various architectural themes spanning from urban narratives to active participation in architectural design in Virtual Reality. The projects engage with real time surveillance, personal and poetic narratives from foreign cities, the work of select architects - such as Bernard Tschumi and Oswald Mathias Ungers, to machine-driven and robotic processes as part of architectural design.

MADINA MINA EL GHAYMA by Andreé Zakhya

Madina mina El Ghayma (A city from the cloud) tells the story of Beirut’s forgotten spaces. The users are invited to drift through post-war Beirut with its domestic spaces and imagine the lives that inhabited them. The city undresses in front of viewers while they navigate through various places and multiple representational realms. The work is deeply narrational and based on aspect to aspect spatial transitions.

EXQUISITE STUFF by Chawapol Watcharasukarn

Exquisite Stuff is an investigation of sectional representation in architecture. The users stand between three different rotating bodies and, using their own bodies, they can actively cut through the revolving elements around them. The project is based on Surrealist techniques of assemblages and the drawing game of the ‘exquisite corpse’, where stuff comes together and forms a new coherent whole.

SATURATED by Yeon Joo Oh

Saturated is a playful spatial design tool in VR based on western canonical architectural projects. The visitors are invited to explore the distinct worlds of James Stirling, Bernard Tschumi, and Oswald Mathias Ungers. In each the visitors are given specific shapes from the respective architects’ work, with which they can carve out the space they’re in. Through geometric projections and spatial gesticulations, Tschumi is carved by Tschumi’s shapes revealing a new Tschumi. Stirling slices through Stirling uncovering an unknown Stirling. Ungers scoops through Ungers exposing a hidden playful Ungers.

ROCO-KOREAN by JunEui (Ren) Song

Roco-Korean is a ritualistic space that celebrates the wonders of AI image transfer and procedural generated modelling by seemlessly blending the aesthetics and architectural elements of a Bavarian Rococo church and a Korean Buddhist Temple. Roco-Korean explores the automated mass production of aesthetics.

THE HALLWYL MUSEUM by Prateek Bajpai

The Hallwyl Museum is a guided tour through the Stockholm museum were objects of doubt have been hidden. The visitors are taken through these strange rooms that are transformed into cabinets of curiosities.

THE EMERGENCE OF ORNAMENTAL BODIES by Soubhi Baraghit

This thesis is an exploration of architectural ornaments generated through staging and registering movement of a sheet of paper with industrial robots and a photographic snanning device. The movement is registered through a depth perception camera as coagulated surface resulting in ornamental bodies at various scales.

LIVE STREAM by Suyoung Ko

Live Stream is an immersive real-time experience where visitors find themselves on a fictive intersection of two streets in a small town in New Mexico. The urban space is constructed from simultaneous real-time videos streams, sourced online from multiple surveillance cameras in Silver City, New Mexico; Dublin,; New-YorkCity; Chicago; Upper saddle river, New Jersey and Hannibal, Missouri. Every frame is updated in real-time and each visitors experiences a different scene depending on the time of day. This thesis plays on the idea of the panopticon and its political and cultural implications in the realm of accessible surveillance footage worldwide.

Students work by Postgraduate Master students André Zakhya, Chawapol Watcharasukarn, Yeon Joo Oh, JunEui Song (Ren), Prateek Bajpai, Soubhi Baraghit, and Suyoung Ko - SAC, 2019 - Frankfurt

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