People on the building
Project the building's people onto the fair-faced concrete, giving the cold architecture the life of those who use it.
Building + people Selected Work
Rooftop Garden
A typhoon tore the iron roof off Weixin Hall—the fallen roof became a canvas for the people of the building.
The roof stayed with the building for fourteen years. Then a storm moved it into the atrium.
The Storm Left Something Behind
During the 2024 Mid-Autumn holiday, typhoon Bebinca made landfall in Shanghai—the strongest typhoon to hit the city since 1949. It tore the iron roof of the car photography studio off Weixin Hall and dropped it into the atrium.
The fallen roof broke the monotony of the atrium and became a new talking point for people passing by. Compared with clearing the remnant away, this project asks what it could become instead.
Fourteen Years of Memory
The iron roof had silently accompanied the students of Weixin Hall for fourteen years. Instead of paying the high cost of removal, the proposal lets the building component keep working—as memory.
A component that stays
The roof accompanied the school for fourteen years; the memory can keep working in a new role.
Keep the remnantThe atrium as garden
The roof's own shape bridges the lower outdoor platform and the upper roof garden, breaking the flat eye-level view of the first floor.
Garden, extendedThe roof was later cleared away; this document remains a proposal for what could have been.
Spatial Analysis
The installation sits in the atrium south of the college library. The audience walks and interacts along the first-floor corridor; the camera and projector face the roof remnant in the atrium below.
The Interaction: A Flower Shadow
A camera watches the first-floor corridor. When a passerby walks through the interaction area, the computer extracts their silhouette in real time and projects a flower-composed human shadow onto the fallen roof in the atrium.
The person appears inside the roof remnant, as if they had become part of the garden the roof once covered. The most beautiful flowers in the building meet the most spirited people in the building.
When projection is not possible during the day, the roof remains in the atrium as an abstract sculpture.
Technical Notes
Non-planar projection
The remnant is not a flat screen: content must be mapped to its shape, and the surface treated so it displays well.
Projection mappingSilhouette extraction
The camera's live image is processed to extract the passerby's overall outline.
Computer visionFlower-image generation
The extracted outline is turned into a moving figure composed of flowers.
Image generationReferences
The design grew from a photograph taken on 20 September 2024, the day the roof fell, and from the architectural documentation and on-site survey of Weixin Hall.
What this is
A proposal that keeps an accident as memory—rather than erasing it—by making the building's people visible on the very piece the storm moved.