DESA1002 'Nine Quarter City' - <Yilun Zhang>

Abstract

Throughout this semester we were doing a comprehensive project based on a real city, and I was gratitude for being in the Madrid group. Doing a large project especially for a real place which has its own features and culture sounds like impossible for a year 1 green-hand. Thanks to the arrangement of small tasks every week we could finally come to the resolution step by step. Basically I was satisfied with my production, and moreover what I was most happy about was that I began to understand how an idea eventually became reality and was able to solve the problems with the help of the tutor. Tom was really an experienced tutor and he was really patient. The advices he gave in the tutorials by all means prompted my project to a higher standard, pragmatically, little by little, and eventually when I reviewed what I had been doing through this exhausting but meaningful period of time, I was astonished by the progress I had made. What impressed me the most in the communication with Tom was once he told us a unique architecture should have several ‘landmarks’ besides normal functional area, and another time he said “‘interesting’ can be risky (or dangerous).” indicating that creativity should be based on a convincing rational solution. I also appreciated Hamish’s advice which allowed me to understand my project with a totally different angle when he was our guest tutor in preliminary presentation Tienda de la moda, which means fashion shop in Spanish, was not merely a design practice project for me. As I said in the final presentation that fashion is a way of life, and when the term is bound to over, I realized that design is truly a way of our life. We are gradually developing our lives as designers, we are thinking more like designers, we look more like designers and we will become professional designers anyway. It must be painful to achieve this, while I will enjoy every moment of the painful progress. Fashion shop in Madrid, I love it.