Mass Customization and Design for High Density Indemnificatory Housing in China

Abstract

The use of computer in architectural design shouldn’t sacrifice the pursuit of a human-oriented built environment. The technological applications should be legitimated by the objectives and motivations in multiple dimension, but not abuse its generative power against the social and cultural interests. This article is based upon our synthetic computational design research for high density indemnificatory housing in China (Fig. 1), which challenges the conventional standard design for large scale social housing in the Industrial Era, and reflects our exploration for innovative, multi-disciplinary, systematic and synthetic design in the new design paradigm of computation. It also promotes to shift the privilege of cutting edge design techniques and avantgarde concepts from the “High (end) Architecture” to the ordinary architecture during the unprecedented built environment development in China. Architectural design should have no discrimination between the Olympic stadiums in the capital and the social housing in the subordinate developed cities, as they both need to be innovative and meaningful. The final design research outputs address sustainable transformation initiated by the residents during the whole life span of the housing. We believe that the human factor (including stakeholders, users, designers and builders) is even more important in architectural design, city planning, urban design, landscape and interior design while technology development is accelerating. Conceptualization, imagination and systemization would become significant pacemakers which perpetuate design innovation.