inspiration
the awakening mediatheque
lion dance
I always believe that design started with intention and inspiration. That’s why sometime I quite agree with the phrase of “there’s nothing new called new”. No matter what kind of product you designing, you always has something in your mind to refer, that’s what we called inspiration. Having an inspiration is good because it gives you an idea where to start, but it could be a bad thing if you just copy, please never do that.
Design Studio 03 Jan 2016
by Chong Wei Hao
Location: Spice Garden, Penang
Inspired by traditional lion dance aiming to promote the culture of lion dance through display and real life experience.
Profile
In previous semester, my final project was to design a mediatheque that promotes the culture of Penang. In Penang, Chinese culture was consider more dominant and more interesting because it used to be a port in the past days which attract traders from different country especially China. Do you ever heard of lion dance? It’s one of the most iconic performance culture of Chinese. For your info, the first lion dance ever registered was at 1903 in Penang. Although in ancient times it held a sacred religious significance, but today it’s evolved into a cultural pastime, and even a sport.
This mediatheque was designed to promote the culture and art of lion dance to the visitors. Visitors are able to explore, learn and experience lion dance before the extinction of this unique Malaysian culture. Therefore, my design inspiration was the lion in lion dance. By having lion as my inspiration, first I have studied about the outlook and material of a lion. The lion head was made of bamboo structure, with decorated fabric as its body. Due to the big movement of performers like jumping and stretching, the lion head should be light in weight. Both bamboo and fabric are lightweight materials that doesn’t add unnecessary extra weight for the performance during performance. This characteristic of lion has inspire me to design a building which is lightweight architecture. Due to the hilly site condition, it’s good to use lightweight structure to reduce the harm towards the hilly soil. I have decide to use bamboo as the structure and tensile membrane as the roof of this building.
The arrangement of building itself is inspired by the movement of a lion during performance. As you know, during the performance, the lion will play on the stilts. It jump from one platform to another, up and down. This movement inspire me to design an architecture that plays with various height. This is one of the design response towards the sloppy hill as well. Different in height gives people new experience as at different level of height, the view is different. From the main building, you can see the performance below but while you’re at the lower point, the building become so grand and gigantic to you. It shows the power, majesty, courage and strength of lion as well.
The tensile membrane roof is one of the selling point of this mediatheque. The bravely selection of tensile membrane makes it different from the other. The form is of course, inspired by the body of lion. It’s curvy and light just like the fabric on the lion itself. During the night, the light inside to building makes this semi-transparent skin glow in the dark and create a warm feeling.
In conclusion, throughout 2 years of study in designing architecture, I found that it’s important to have something or someone to inspire you in the stage of design. Inspiration kind of giving you a direction where to go but it’s not the ending of your journey. We should design with our own intention and thinking and express your idea through your design. Don’t play safe,so be wild and bold in your design
