Architecture has long pretended to be clean, sealed and purged of anything microscopic. But the very systems meant to protect us; HVAC ducts, dehumidifiers, steam vents; quietly produce their own fog, condensation, and microbial blooms. This pavilion makes those hidden atmospheres explicit.
The Condenser is a fog-driven, dust-catching pavilion that hijacks HVAC logics. Warm human breath meets chilled surfaces; steam encounters porous membranes; condensation traps airborne dust and spores. Microbes colonize the residue… Turning building exhaust into ecosystem.
Opacity becomes an ethic: vision is interrupted, surfaces become unreadable and the pavilion records every encounter as sediment.
The pavilion exposes that we live not alone, but in constant entanglement with the microscopic.
Ref. 1. Fog-collection systems in Chile, along the arid northern coast, use mesh nets to harvest the dense coastal fog. As wind pushes moisture through the mesh, microscopic droplets condense, gather, and run down into gutters, producing a surprisingly reliable water supply for communities where rainfall is nearly nonexistent.
Ref. 3. The project reclaims that wasted condensation by using “coral logic”: a porous aggregation that behaves like a living reef. The object invites moisture, slowing it down, catching it, letting it bead, collect and thicken. The system grows around water the way coral grows around currents, turning atmospheric residue into form, structure, and spatial opacity.
This project was completed in Design Tactics under Prof. Jia Weng.