PUBLICATION: Building Metabolism: Recipes for Food and Resource Cycles - Q4 2025
Platform Urbanism has reactively pushed human interaction to forge an inhumane and phygital (physical and digital) uncanny relationship with their devices. Electronic devices and screens promote a form of reliance on daily human interaction, whereby ‘screens’ performatively acts as a form of mediator in how society intersects (or, interconnects) with physical space. Architecture is essentially a vessel through which communities are formed. WE-DESIGNS and team provides a "recipe" for an architectural and urban provocation that references ongoing research on digitalSTRUCTURES: Meta-Spaces-Restaurants.
Often, as architects, we facilitate, design, and enhance human-bond through shared experiences in physical space. digitalSTRUCTURES: Meta-Restaurants is a provocation that goes beyond the physical space. This series introduces a hybrid interior-architecture and screen-based research that questions the authenticity between relationships of how humans "stay in touch."
This sliver of provocation is part of an ongoing research series of explorations on ‘digital domesticity’, published by ORO editions, authored by Wendy W Fok in: digitalSTRUCTURES: Data and Urban Strategies of the Civic Future engages with digital property and data infrastructures and explores new modes and impacts of data collection affecting architecture and urban infrastructure. Digital currencies (cryptocurrencies) and digital property require large amounts of land, resources, and data centers and infrastructures to store these “supplies”. There is a larger architectural and urban infrastructural challenge and urgency on how these various kinds of digital exchanges are mediated, to limit the detrimental use of our everyday resources.
Book Description: How can we design the architecture of metabolism? How can architecture redefine resources, produce food, and be eaten away? EDIBLE aims to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material recycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics, and excremental processes. This book presents a collection of writing on architecture, food, and metabolism, exploring an important science-art-architecture complex absent from contemporary considerations of sustainable design. It maps and redraws the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production, and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.
Publisher/Year
Actar, 2025
Editors
Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou
Role
Invited contributor and exhibitor to the Tallinn 2022 Exhibition and Biennale by curators Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou.
Premise
digitalSTRUCTURES: Meta-Restaurants
Research Lead
Wendy W Fok
Research Assistants
Rashi Gupta, Yarzar Hlaing (2022)
JJ Zhijie Jin, Jessica Marquez (2024)
PROJECT: Moto Club Los Angeles - Q2 2024
Motorcycle Retail Store Design at the Moto Club Los Angeles 2024
WE-DESIGNS kicked-started in October 2023 the consultation of Moto Club Los Angeles (previously, Moto Club Santa Monica) on the Store Design and Development of their new store off Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. Moto Club Los Angeles is the second store of the Moto Club brand. Transforming an old bicycle shop, the project was a success for the sport riding community of Los Angeles and Track-based Racers.
Image Credit of the Moto Club Los Angeles, provided by WE-DESIGNS.
#motorcycle #exhibition #motoclub #motoclublosangeles
Press & Communications
Kristina Soriano-Jacobs
Email: kristina (at) we-designs.com
Lillian He
Email: lillian (at) we-designs.com
AWARD: digitalSTRUCTURES Publication - Q4 2023
Our team at WE-DESIGNS is grateful for an amazing round-up of architecture and design awards for the 360' design of digitalSTRUCTURES.
digitalSTRUCTURES is a special project that took over 2-years to realize (10-years if including the research!), as our entire team engaged in the different printed, digital, and immersive design of the entire project scope. From the cover design by Jung Ahn, to the research and development by Jessica, Marquez and JJ Jin amongst others, to the keystone of the content that was written and designed by Wendy W Fok, to the strategic marketing by Lillian He, our entire team worked together to make digitalSTRUCTURES a first time for many, including our publisher ORO Editions.
‘digitalSTRUCTURES’ uses the vehicle of a ‘physical book’ (published by ORO Editions) into a ‘physical exhibition’ that offers a 360’ and pivotal digital engagement point of how we can design physical spaces in various scales. This project was key to developing and experimenting on how architectural spaces, through exhibition design, expands and extends the lifespan of physical objects shown in an exhibition space.
The exhibition design engages with storefront windows that bring out AR elements that are activated by visitors that enable them to bring animation and dynamic effects of the physical 3D models into their devices. The core concept has always been to learn how we can engage and educate a viewer, visitor, reader, and guest viewing the exhibition, into various physical and digital worlds. Whether they wanted to read to learn, or engage with AR/XR elements to learn, the options are endless. Visitors can visit the exhibition, to learn more about how digital infrastructures play a heavy part of their lives through the physical exhibition or read chapters within the book.
The exhibition is complemented by a multi-media digital platform (digitalstructures.cc), includes interviews recorded activated by the physical objects within the space, onto each visitor's devices as podcasts. The interviews are with industry specialists, like Saskia Sassen, Paola Antonelli, et al. All the audio content is activated through the engagement of the exhibition, and through parts of the book. The key to the exhibition is always to provide a feedback loop between the exhibition <> book, vice-versa.
A+D Museum Design Awards 2023
- 1st Runner-Up (Category: On The Desk) > Printed Matter
- 1st Runner-Up (Category: Realtime/Interactive) > AR Content and Development
AIA Dallas KRob Awards 2023
Architizer Vision Awards 2023
- Best Of The Year > Architect Creator Of The Year
- Special Mention
Project Social
Project Website: http://digitalstructures.cc
#digitalSTRUCTURES
Press & Communication
Lillian He
Email: lillian (at) we-designs.com