Nadia Beatriss Young

Nadia has recently completed her architecture studies at the Royal College of Art (MA, 2022) and completed her BA Architecture at Newcastle University (2018). Originating from the UK and Hong Kong and growing up in Dubai, the multicultural nature of her background and identity has largely influenced her interests and line of research in her practice. She views architecture as a tool and instrument in manifesting the relationships between people and urbanism, specifically in relation to socio-political and cultural contexts.

Nadia situates her practice between art, architecture, and music. Her current line of research explores the notion of abstracted space defined through intangible agencies. With a background in classical music, her interests lie in understanding and interpreting the built environment through a lens of sonic experiences, where sound and music become architectural components.

Culture is largely influenced by our sense of belonging, home, and connection to a place. This connection is formed through commonalities, rituals, and traditions. As well as the more spiritual or festive forms of rituals, there lies a significance in the mundane. The everyday simplicities from making a morning coffee or travelling on the tube to taking a daily walk in the park becomes a part of our daily sequences, our muscle memory. These familiar spaces become an extension of who we are and how we situate ourselves within the city. They become a component of our cultural identity.

As a transnational of both Hong Kong Chinese and British nationality, my own definition of cultural identity is often challenged. My sense of home and belonging originated in Hong Kong, where my first memories were established. After relocating through multiple countries and now living in the UK, my cultural connection to Hong Kong has become somewhat detached. Now, Hong Kong is an immaterial concept, it doesn’t exist in my present reality, it only exists through memory.

The deprival of a physical connection has left me with an intangible relationship to the city. What if this deprival of the physical can be exploited as a way to elevate the ephemeral? How can the taking away of the physical further expose the intangibles? The project looks to explore this intangible relationship with Hong Kong by extracting memory through sound.

Extracting the Ephemeral

Composing the Domestic

Drawing Sound

Medium:

Animation

Staging Sound – A mime film enacting various with the absence of physical props to focus the senses onto sound.

Drawing Sonic Imagery – Extracting and recording the memories of Hong Kong. Space, geometry, material and emotion are triggered through the prompts of the auditory information.

Transposing Sound to Music

Medium:

Film and Drawing

Bedroom – A place to surrender, to repose, to relax the mind. A similar intimacy and serenity is felt inside the temple as with my bedroom. Red envelopes gently sway as incense silently burns and crackles. The bedroom window fills the room with sunlight, with a view of nature, and so similarly, the forest of banyan trees encompasses this room. The boundary between inside and out becomes blurred here, as serenity is felt together with nature.

Entrance Corridor – The MTR tube, a place of transfer and travel, an interval between one place and another. Similarly a stepping stone as is the entrance corridor of my flat. A place for entering and exiting. The curving and swaying motions of a tube ride are emulated here in a stillness.

Living Room Window – The overwhelming song of birds chirping fill this sound. The scene suggests a wildlife, a nature, with the absence of any bodies. Winding paths fill the memory, with no indication of a beginning or end.

Building Plan

Living Room – Mahjong blocks collide over the sounds of socialising women. The traditional game of Mahjong is being played, and to my memory, a game frequently played in my grandmother's living room in Hong Kong. The series of frames created by the doors are framing and compressing the London living room, almost vacuum packed – one living room opens into another one. The window frame is a portal to the familiar flame trees of the courtyards that surround my grandmother's house.

Kitchen Dining – Crash, clatter, crowds of people and furniture fill this sound. The dimsum hall is vast and grand. Geometry is exaggerated and warped in this memory and so the architecture designs a falsified perspective, with tilting walls and decreasing table sizes. The sound of porcelain fills this audio so greatly that the tables and chairs become the crashing porcelain. A movement of chaos is frozen in time.

Falsifying Perspective – 1:50 Model of Dimsum room illustrating the tilting planes of geometry and decreasing furniture sizes to design an exaggerated false sense of perspective.

The project proposes a building as a sonic documentation of my cultural connection to Hong Kong. Audio information is recorded and collected from various sites in Hong Kong which are then translated into an architecture. Drawing from two sites: Hong Kong and London, each memory is staged within the realities if my London apartment. The architecture is a collision of dream and reality.

Medium:

Visualisations and drawings

Symphonic Memories: 1st Movement, 'Transfer'

Symphonic Memories: 2nd Movement, 'Repose'

Symphonic Memories: 3rd Movement, 'Converse'

As an accompaniment to the architectural representations, music scores notate the piano transpositions of each of the audio clips, documenting the intangible sonic material.

Medium:

Music Scores

Nadia Beatriss Young

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About

Royal College of Art