Grasshopper – UNIT 21

Ioana Drogeanu

Towards a ‘Non-Universal’ Architecture: Designing with Others through Gestures (1:1 Scale) | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024ioana.drogeanu.18@ucl.ac.uk Click To See Thesis The project highlights the collaborative potential of digital tools in creating deeply personal and culturally resonant architectural experiences by integrating intangible cultural heritage into tangible forms. By tracing Spanish cultural gestures at a 1:1 scale in VR, we embed personal traces directly into architectural elements. Co-authorship with

Jeffrey Cheung

Parque Para Perros Español | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024 jeffrey.cheung.18@ucl.ac.uk Historically, dogs have adapted to human-centric environments, and their intelligence is often evaluated from a human perspective. This project emphasizes the collaboration between humans and dogs in architectural design. It explores the analysis and spatialization of human movements and cues to understand how dogs perceive human movement sequentially, rather than generalizing a set of movements. Human movement

Zijie Cai

Vivir la Utopia: Barcelona Anarchist Memorial | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024zijie.cai.18@ucl.ac.uk Click To See Thesis The Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT), founded in 1910, marked the rise of Spanish anarchism, which united workers across Barcelona and Spain. Despite the decline of the CNT’s influence during the Franco regime, this project hopes to revive the movement’s legacy in contemporary memory by establishing an anarchist memorial at the former

Alexandros Photiou

Corazón De La Comunidad: Sequential Generation | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024alexandros.photiou.22@ucl.ac.uk Located on the “Aguas Park”, in the sequentially created Eixample district of Barcelona, this project proposes a novel approach to a community centre, in which the programme revolves around the creation of a community centre which supports and facilitates the cohabitation and interaction of children and the elderly. By utilizing a series of modular spaces, the proposal

Elle Ngamprasertpong

Swimming Landscape Formation | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024kullaphat.ngamprasertpong.20@ucl.ac.uk The project is a swimming landscape sitting on a hill site overlooking the city center. It is a formation of water landscape following a specific topography. From building scale to human scale, the building is designed following two principles: “viewing angles” and “light reflection”. All elements are designed to be part of the landscape, with water flowing naturally from

Wentong (Iris) Feng

Untitled Monuments | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024wentong.feng.21@ucl.ac.uk Nestled within the historical site of Barcelona’s 1888 World Exposition, ‘Untitled Monuments’ is a cultural center dedicated to film conservation and restoration. It uses a unique methodology where film acts as a generative script, determining the survival of image pixel points based on specific parameters. The site, Palacio de les Belles Arts, though demolished, remains significant to Barcelona’s cultural heritage

Yufei Cheng

El Gòtic Plays Itself | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024 yufei.cheng.21@ucl.ac.uk Situated within the historic core of Barcelona, this project conceptualizes a center for Catalan theatre and craftsmanship, drawing on the Spanish proclivity for festivals and theatrical expressions that transmute quotidian street life into elaborate stage settings. The methodology involves documenting and translating the cyclical patterns of seasonal changes, theatrical productions, street festivals, and parades into digitally

Yumeng Yang

Re-weaving Can Batlló | Barcelona, Spain | Unit 21 | 2024 yumeng.yang.22@ucl.ac.uk The project explores the growth pattern from the study and simulation of tree’s mychorrhizal networks. Utilizing Grasshopper scripts, simulation networks are crafted between sources, with initial routes avoiding existing obstacles in the first generation. A new script is then introduced to establish connections between these routes through form generation and curve interference. The results drive the next loop, which

Yaowen Zhang

L’EVOLUZIONE: A dialogue between the new and old human aesthetics | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 Florence is the birthplace of Western humanism and the Renaissance allowed people to really start looking at themselves and documenting their beauty, which has filled the city with aesthetic works of art of the human body. Since the invention of the camera, it has been difficult to break through in terms of

David Abi Ghanem

Florence heritage database: Re-imagining histories | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 My project investigates the creative capacity of a database, examining its capacity to visually portray the relationships between artifacts and to inform the design of a building. This design tool enables the re-interpretation of cultural historical narratives and opens up discussions on the interconnected character of different cultures and their heritage. Moreover, it empowers the viewer/manipulator of

Mattia Salvadori

The Heroes Within | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 On the grounds of Florence’s epicentre of sports of Campo di Marte, traditional, club organized sports have established a permanent mark as the most sought for sports, leaving little to no recognition to self-organized and individualised sports. The project aims to take over, or better, reshape the existing skatepark, continuing its legacy by offering larger, more versatile spaces for

Rory Browne

Scoring Florence | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 Scoring Florence has derived directly from the rhythms, cycles, and durations of the city. A contemporary arts space on the river Arno, the project is a gallery developed through a reconstructed digital score of the city. In the same way a musical score leaves its interpretation up to the performer, the architectural score provides the designer agency in its application and

Zijie Cai

Cimitero della Montagna Verde: Chinese Cemetery in Prato | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 Prato, renowned for its textile industry, is home to a significant Chinese population of 45,000. The relationship between the Chinese and Italian communities in Prato has experienced welcoming phases, cooperation, misunderstandings, and tension over the past three decades. The project proposes expanding the cemetery at the serpentine quarry Cava di Figline in Prato as

Paris Feng

La Marionettistica | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 This project proposes a puppet workshop and theatre in Oltrarno, Florence — a district renowned for its vibrant artisan culture. The chosen site, Piazza di Cestello, holds significance due to its proximity to the River Arno and the 17th-century church San Frediano in Cestello. Despite Florence’s historical association with puppetry through works like ‘The Adventure of Pinocchio,’ the city’s puppet

San Tu

Visualising the Intangible, Capturing Endangered Languages | Florence, Italy | Unit 21 | 2023 Florence has been a theatre of language discussions since the fourteenth century. Until 1861 the Italian peninsula was formed of many states, each with its own language or dialect. Italian was adopted as the official language with the unification of Italy. Previously, the Italian language was a literary language based on Tuscan as spoken mostly by

Jacqueline Yu

The Playscape Garden | London, UK | Unit 21 | 2021 Awarded First Class Honours The Playscape Garden is a versatile community centre where architectural elements can be altered by the community within the building or from afar. The community’s presence is felt in the garden, whether through digital or physical means. With the mouse-tracking and manipulation techniques developed in the previous project, one of the ‘tending’ actions–sifting–is translated into

James Potter

Death in Venice | Venice, Italy | Unit 21 | 2020 Awarded Distinction for Design Click to see Thesis Click to see 4th year work Venice, more than any other European city has an endlessly seductive charm, a projection of familiar yet unreal, a possibility of escaping reality through imagination and dreaming. The travels of Marco Polo as depicted in Italo Calvino’s Invisible cities, celebrates the qualities of a city

Paul-Andrei Burghelea

Transcending Gondolas into Architecture | Venice, Italy | Unit 21 | 2020 Click to see Design Realisation My year’s work has been sited in Venice Italy where I have analysed the traditional Venetian gondola, looking at its specific geometries, traditional and cultural importance to the city. The project harnesses the traditional craftsmanship of the few remaining gondola workshops and combined with computation processes develops a new event space in the

James Carden

The Ministry Of Ground | Venice, Italy | Unit 21 | 2020 Click to see Design Realisation Project OverviewThe Ministry of Ground is an architecture that speculates on the importance of dredged material and its reappropriation within the Venice lagoon. A constantly evolving floating terrazzo landscape is formed out of dredged masonry debris and silt, dug from the Venetian canals. This landscape is made up of square components formed by

Tom Band

Fondazione Gucci | Venice, Italy | Unit 21 | 2020 Click to see Design Realisation Venice is – and always has been – read through a series of images, from Canaletto and the vedute paintings synonymous with the Grand Tour, to the hyper-saturated documentation of social media feeds. These images permeate through the collective consciousness, absorbed through postcards, fridge magnets, and even artificial reproductions of the city, in Las Vegas

Minh Ngoc Tran

The Oculus | Athens, Greece | Unit21 | 2019 Click to see Thesis Click to see 4th year work The Oculus is a speculative Stock Exchange design based on the translation of the quantitative phenomenon in Athens, Greece. Additionally, the parameters derive from the unique human digital prints, the sun, and the collective stock movement. They are undergone an negotiation between pure algorithmic design and the realisation of space in

James Potter

A City of Routes | Athens, Greece| Unit 21 | 2019 Click to see Design Realisation Heterotopia / he-ta-ra-ta-pia / – Spaces that have more layers of meaning or relationships in other places than immediately meets the eye. Athens is renowned and overwhelmed with ancient architecture, a city or ruins, relying on the fortune of its history, yet it ignores and forgets the present and future remains. What is the identity

Alan Ma Y4

The Image of the City | Turin, Italy | Unit 21 | 2018 Click to see Design Realisation Click image to zoom–> The project takes experimental image analysis techniques to propose new frontier spaces within the large complex city that actively responds to its digital profile by using social media and crowdsourcing to shape how we perceive our built environment. Started with a piece of research from Yahoo that aimed

Minh Ngoc Tran

Tree of Turin / Bull’s Emporium| Turin, Italy | Unit 21 | 2018 Click to see Design Realisation Click image to zoom–> The Tree of Turin was constructed through various historical and modern data mining, and so it is broken down again to produce a genetic instruction for form growing. The research project dwells on the attempts to compile composite data in relation to the city of Turin. The city boundary

Yasaman Mohsanizadeh

How can Language Change the Way We Design Architecture? | Turin, Italy | Unit 21 | 2018 Awarded Distinction for Design Click to see Thesis Click to see 4th year work Click image to zoom–> 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation migrants lack representation in the policies and urban planning agendas of the Five Star Movement, Turins incumbent political party. As a result, there are residing social, cultural and