Tsui Design And Research

International Protocols

Projects and plans should spring forth from an understanding and respect for local cultures and native building methods. The design of these projects should be informed by spending time in the geographic location where they are to be built. There is no good substitute for the kind of knowledge of a region and its people that comes from direct, first-hand, on-location experience.

By immersing ourselves in the others’ world, we learn how they perceive time, space and material objects. We experience how they strive to preserve their environment and how their cultural history informs their relationship to the natural world.

The Shenzhen Bay Tower project emerged after decades of work and play in that region by Eugene Tsui and his staff. It mixes Shenzhen’s modern strength and Guangzhou’s traditional fragility. It honors the gateway basin to the South China Sea and Pearl River Delta as a place to both replenish the gentle estuarial sea and feel it deeply as one network.

Some designs call for an awareness and research into local cultural and environmental details. The Dubai Eye in the Sky design preserves every precious droplet of water and collects it into oasis vats. The proposed bridges over the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bering Strait replicate the Paleolithic social history with a twist. These designs demonstrate how modern technology can be used to both preserve ancient cultural belief systems and solve current regional energy and resource scarcity issues.

The Nexus Floating Sea City and Ultima Tower are aimed at the preservation of city-dwelling communities, the restoration of the oceans and the recording and remembering of the things that went wrong with earlier, less-thoughtful 20th century development schemes. This kind of preservation of past values and development of a sustainable future built within the context of the indigenous culture constitutes a simple protocol for the 21st century.