WanderYards

WanderYards samples the courtyard as the void-room of the house: the room defined not by its own walls but by what surrounds it. The team, Chen Chen, Genmao Li and Zixuan Wang, combined a handful of courtyard samples under occupational restrictions, asking how far the granularity of a rule can shift before the repetition of a few simple rooms turns into diversity. The answer stands in the model: a tower of courtyards, 3D-printed in white, in which no yard resembles its neighbor although all are built from the same samples. The printed slabs are thin enough to let light through the yards, and the section shows why: the courtyards are stacked into one another, not placed side by side. A catalogue of drawings records every sample and its combinations, and a series of renderings sets the aggregate among the white blocks of a city.

Spelled Wa(o)nderYards in its first year, the project was developed in 2016–17 in Research Cluster 8 of the Bartlett B-Pro, the first year of Large City Architecture, led by Daniel Koehler with Rasa Navasaityte as consultant and Christoph Zimmel as computational consultant. The cluster read the house as a city of parts at three scales, a house of walls, a house of rooms and a house of houses, and the courtyard was the part this team chose. Its film and its model stood in the B-Pro Show from 26 September to 15 October 2017, the tower rising from a dark plinth in front of the windows onto the street.

In 2018 the model traveled to Coder le Monde at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, on view from May to August, where it stood on a pale plinth in a dark gallery with two framed drawings lit on the wall beside it. After the exhibition the piece entered the museum’s permanent collection through a peer-reviewed acquisition: the model, 1.5 by 1.2 by 0.8 meters, a 3D print with its sectional drawing and computational drawing (MNAM-CCI, inv. AM 2018-2-152).

For the lab the piece marks the moment the research left the studio: a student project became a museum object. The courtyard returned as a question two years later, when the MultiYards team of Research Cluster 17 reinterpreted it as a distributive device to share and orient access and ownership.