M.S. AAD Final Project: Decode the city
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This portfolio contains the works during my study of architecture and urbanism as a M.S. AAD student of Cornell AAP as well as my perspective of architecture and urbanism which supports this academic journey. The critical text introduces and explores a Grand Unification model of architecture and urbanism. Grand Unification Theory is a model in the field of physics that tries to describe the universe using a single theory of physics to explain almost all the fundamental forces responsible for the movement of all objects in the universe. With the non-stop process of human exploration, the complexity of human perception of the universe rises but the mathematical and physical model of physicists in interpreting the universe gets simpler. Like the complex force fields of the universe, the city, the field for millions of people and countless human activities, is a complex system with incredibly large numbers of layers of interacting agents. To think of the urban environment as a system of interacting agents, look for interacting forces between the agents, and simplify the complex system with careful selection of key agents and key forces to a model that can be easily comprehended and even able to be manipulated. In other words, to decode the city, to abstract the city into matrices of agents and forces. The text that follows describes how I have explored this idea of a unified field or model in different courses, studios and seminars.