Asemic Forest
Advisors: Hernan Diaz Alonso, Steven Ma
This thesis began with a provocation: to reimagine Vienna’s Westbahnhof train station. Rather than replace the existing building, I chose to intervene by layering it with new, unruly structures that complicated its rational order instead of erasing it.
The project was guided by the idea of spontaneous order: complexity emerging not from control but from processes that resemble growth, decay, and transformation in nature. The design resisted linear cause and effect and unfolded instead as a circular meditation on time, metamorphosis, and ephemerality.
Although framed as a building proposal, Asemic Forest was less a project than an experiment in letting form arise “naturally,” a contamination of the urban fabric with both inner and outer realities.
Looking back, this work was foundational. It introduced themes that continue to anchor my practice today: the tension between order and disorder, the presence of time and change in built environments, and the search for architectural languages that move beyond pure rationalism into the sensory, ecological, and ephemeral. These explorations formed the ground for my later spatial and olfactory installations, where scent, atmosphere, and material processes operate as living architectures that carry the same concerns of temporality, transformation, and layered complexity.