Shuttling through time zones is second nature for Yichen Lu, the 39-year-old founder and principal of Studio Link-Arc. Lu—a Shanghai native who doubles as an associate professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing—spent this year bouncing between New York and China, with frequent stops in Italy to supervise the construction of the Milan Expo’s China Pavilion. But despite the firm’s global reach, each of its projects remains deeply local. Its aim is to build structures that foster dialogue between people and their natural surroundings. By weaving nature into the built environment, Studio Link-Arc aims to construct what Lu calls a “second nature” of its own.
“Nature, rather than man-made structures, is the eternal theme of architecture,” Lu says. This idea shone through every bamboo panel of the China Pavilion’s roof, a four-layer feat of digital fabrication and parametric design that hovered over a carefully paced sequence of spaces. The temporary pavilion was built for the six-month Milan Expo, which ended on October 31. However, the structure’s roof, which merged the profile of a city skyline with topographical curves, evoked the permanence of an urban landscape. The sun beamed through a translucent PVC membrane beneath the panels, casting shadows that stretched and shifted across the pavilion’s interior as the day passed. “It’s a building that can record time,” Lu says. Such fluid yet precise interactions with the elements occur at varying scales across Link-Arc’s portfolio, from renovations to new gallery spaces. In the firm’s current furnishings project for Milan’s 2016 Design Week, nature serves as an inspiration, as the team is experimenting with patterns and folds that mimic mountains and waves.
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