After our visit to the Chinese Heritage Centre and the talk by Professor Chen Yu, we were all quite intrigued about the history of Nantah university as well as the establishment of NTU.

Here are some of our takeaways from Professor Chen Yu’s presentation:
– NTU is made up of a transition of history; the campus itself is a narrative of the progression of NTU from Nantah days till present.
– The building materials and patterns of the architecture can give an indication of when the building was built, as well as its influences.

Based on this, and upon the realisation that people tend to describe a building based on its architecture and its surrounding spaces, we decided to head towards the direction of creating a timeline map where the buildings are sorted by the decade that they were built in, and represented by distinctive patterns that makes them easily identifiable. Through this map, we hope to be able to bring out the history and progression of NTU in a visual manner, to create more awareness about the story of our campus and allow them to experience our campus through a different perspective.

Our first step was to do some research into when the buildings were built, and at the same time finding out interesting information about them:

We also went around observing and documenting patterns that are distinctively related to a building’s architecture (we have yet to cover the entire campus, we will aim to finish it in the coming week!):

These are some quick sketches that we’ve been doing so far, we’re considering patterns that are visible from an aerial view as well, not just patterns that are visible from our eye level. We have also started considering the layout of our project and what it might look like. Our current plan is to display the patterns of the buildings by decades on acrylic pieces, hanging them up in an open space that people can weave in and out, a metaphor for exploring our campus and travelling through time.

We will be working on the layout of the individual acrylic pieces and creating more patterns that could represent each building. We will also be exploring the campus to document more photos of patterns, watch this space!