Bingqing Chen

The project is a working/living space for the emerging class of professional video game players whose everyday life is purely based around engagement in a leisure pursuit. The project hence challenges the existing architecture model of co-working and co-living in the same space and tests a new living typology where a liberation for culture, pleasure and affection takes place.

It is informed by the new Babylon model where people live on a continuous surface within the urban landscape and where there are no divisions for individuality and domesticity but, instead, pure engagement with different events and activities. The project seeks to provide a continuous and uninterrupted working/sleeping space for professional gamers where amenities are pushed to the boundary or lift up from the main working space to provide uninterrupted non-stop gaming at the same time as a sleeping environment for the inhabitants whose life is dominated by one single activity without the limits of an everyday time frame. The layout of tables and sleeping bags within the gaming surface is orientated and clustered according to different game types. With all the PC towers and monitors connected to the flowing ceiling structure, the whole space is controlled by artificial light and colours which represent and amplify individual gamers’ activities and celebrate the digital artefacts of this emerging lifestyle.