Nanjing Lab III / Yaohua Wang Architecture / The Superslice

Yesterday, we introduced you to the techno-opulent work of SCI-Arc alumnus Yaohua Wang, his Beijing House II. We compared him to an architectural mashup of Jones, Partners: Architecture and Xefirotarch. You can also throw in the previous work of, another favorite, Neil Denari and elements of some of our favorite sci-fi films in that mix; District 9 comes to mind.

It’s all makes for an ace symbiosis of blob architecture, futurist aesthetics, and the mechanical/machine/industrial design fetish. Completely self-indulgent and fucking sublime.

This turn, we present Yaohua Wang’s proposal for a vegetation laboratory in Nanjing, China. The project was comissioned by the Nanjing Xiaguan district goverment and is currently within the schematic design phase. Unreal.

Needless to say, we are huge fans of this young designer’s work.

–@teemunny

Nanjing Lab III SYNOPSIS:

Nanjing Lab is a plant growing lab located in the historical area of Nanjing. Different from the traditional plant lab, which focus on the attributes of plants them self, the purpose of the Nanjing lab is to test the plants’ behavior inside Nanjing city, for instance how the plants react to the polluted city air and city’s daily dust. Therefore the design focus on how to let the plant get interact with outside and meanwhile still remain the control to it.

In order to do this, in Nanjing Lab, all different plants been put into separate containers which stick out from the main volume of the building into outside environment. The container itself provide the ability to let sun light go through and controlled amount of air go through. At the same time, the form of landscape around the building help to create different humidity and solar condition around the building, to let all the container to interact with an unique environment.

In the middle of the lab, there is a central robot arm to take the core of the container out and put into storage for further research about the plant. And the control room for the robot arm is located on the south side of the building with 180 degree inside view and two blob window for exterior view.

Two big C channel steel beams are the main structure of Nanjing lab. They lift the main body of the lab off from the ground, to provide space for the underside plant containers. In between the C channel steel beams and the body of lab space are the hydraulic mechanical system to absorb the impact to the structure from movement of the central robot arm.