Zen

Zen Buddhism is focusing on how to make people become conscious on what they are doing and pay attention to the surrounding. Many of the ritual activities or ceremonies seem to be pointless and waste of time such as raking the sand in the zen garden, the tea ceremony etc., but the hidden goal is to practice meditation and to practice on doing things consciously. Many people misunderstand that the only way to practice meditation is to close your eyes and sit in a quiet place, but doing things consciously or pay attention on what you are doing is also considered to be the way to practice meditation.

Hong Kong can be considered to be a chaos city where many people are busy on what they are doing, sometimes they can work or do things very quickly, but unconsciously such as quickly walking to their workplace in the morning. So it is hard to make them slow down to practice meditation or to make them be more conscious on what they are doing. Zen monks practice meditation in a very quiet and calm place such as in the forest or in the temple. But in order to make Hong Kong people to be alert and conscious in such a chaos city is to create a contrast transition. Where one space would be a totally different from the real  surrounding which the zen ceremony will occur to get people's attention and another space would be the real surrounding.

According to the actors that I extracted from Zen Buddhism, I came up with the idea of using magnifier to burn things which requires precision of how the glass tilt, which it could gets people's attention.

So during the day, sunlight is used to melt or burn things and laser light will be use at night. The robot arms will be attached on the elevated escalator and tilt the glass in different angle to melt/burn the roof. The roof will be made up of different materials which has various melting point. This will slightly distort the shape of the roof and create burning marks, which in a few year the roof will change its shape and color.

But somehow it is contrast to the Zen Buddhism which is very calm and peaceful. This idea seems to be too violent and after a few years, the burnt and distorted escalator wouldn't be very pleasant for the users.