25

DESIGN STATEMENT

Socializing Space

In the late 2019, a very dangerous virus appeared and it was first spreading in Wuhan, China. The World Health Organization (WHO) named this virus as SARS Covid-19. This virus mainly attacks our respiratory system so it can make us hardly breathe. This virus also can cause any other symptoms and it can also lead to death. This virus can transmit between peoples because this virus can stick to peoples body and any other objects so it becomes contaminated then when other people get contact with it, it can easily go inside our body through our mouth, eyes, and nose. This virus can also be transmitted through the air because of the droplets that came out from people's mouths. Because of the danger and the way that virus spreads it makes people nowadays have to keep a distance to communicate so they can prevent the spreading of the virus.

A lot of human activity nowadays has become virtual because of the virus, especially a lot of social aspects. Some examples are the public spaces like parks have become deserted. Normally people in the park can do a lot of things like talking, walking, sightseeing, etc. But now after Covid-19 attacks, activity like talking which requires people to get in contact with each other in a short distance becomes really dangerous. Our design goal is to make people can talk again in the park freely with the sense of existence.

Actually people can still do the talking activity just by using some kind of transparent layer that can prevent physical and droplets contact, but that kind of thing just makes the quality of the park become lower. Rather than creating something same as before with lower quality, our idea is to create something new with a new point of interest to make the park become more attractive but still safe.

Our design ideas come from the combination of the old fashioned way to talk or communicate with the nowadays mostly way to communicate or talk using virtual support platforms. The combination of those two will create some new way to communicate that can also give a new point of interest for the park. The old way to communicate provides us a real image of a person and also the feel of existence while the nowadays way only gives us a virtual/unreal image of us through technology and lack the feel of existence. Our ideas called this new way of communication as a ‘transition’ phase that can provide a virtual/unreal image but with the feel of existence. To realize those ideas, we implement those characteristics into some architectural module that is created by a combination of mirrors using the principle of periscope. This modular periscope can also create some intimate feel of space because of the hallway to increase the quality of communication for the users. But at the end the most important thing is it can provide safety for the users health.