Junjie Zhang

A City of the Third Space: Fragmentation & Transformation

…Wandering among the ruins, one should not be instilled with the awareness of the phenomenon of obliteration, but rather a sense of the transience of things (narrative). Moreover, Isozaki also believes that the future city is the ruin of the current city which is created upon the ruins of the past. Hence, it can be argued that the idea of the ruin is the two sides of the contemporary city and what lies in between the ruins of the past and the future is the unpredictable and ever-changing state of the present.

Appropriating from Isozaki’s view on city, the project “a city of the third space: beyond the binary” aims to create a city that is composed by multiple layers of fragments that operates on a fictive system to construct the city as a fictive utopian ruin which lies in-between the binary logic of the semiotics of the past and the future and present the looping and continuity of the memory. To create the new city is to essentially articulate a stance by means of which to critique both the past and the future at the same time…