Blue Horizon Estate

October 13, 2019

Tsinghua School of Architecture + Atelier Li Xinggang | 10/2015-04/2016

Thesis Project / Professional Work

SD/DD/CD

Blue Horizon Estate is a commissioned project by BHG to Atelier Li Xinggang. The project is located in Haikou old town on Hainan Island, the southernmost corner of China. The client identified the residence as resort-oriented, and intended to capitalize on the island's scenic landscape. The project team thus embarked on a strategic placement of sculptural forms that not only orchestrate the views towards local landmarks, but also borrows from traditional Chinese garden making to shape the buildings themselves as beheld scenes. Each tower culminates with a "rooftop mansion", a specialized unit with autonomous layout, as the finishing touch of the garden analog.

In my six-month internship, I assisted in the development of the residence podium & tower with drawing and 3d modeling, and developed the rooftop mansions units.

Viewing and Being Viewed

The residence towers are positioned in a cascading sequence to accentuate landscape focal points and maximize views. The residence towers borrow shapes from traditional rockery ("fake mountains"), while the rooftop mansions complete their narrative as a miniature landscape in which man dwell.

The residences and the hotel were designed as a coherent group, not only in that they work together to construct a picturesque form, but also in that they spectacularize each other. Viewing and being viewed, are in constant conversion as people behold, visit, and dwell.

Bldg #1

Bldg #2

BLDG #3

Bldg #4

Bldg#5

Residence Elevations

Siteplanning & Building Arrangement

Residence Exploded View

Bldg #1 Plans (Apartment)

Rooftop Mansions

The rooftop mansions are dependent on the residence towers in circulation, but have autonomous plans. It is comparable to a penthouse, but closer to a courtyard house space-wise. A one-story tall structure layer releases its plan layout from the tower.

Bldg #5 Plans (Hotel)

Residence Sections

Rooftop Mansions Exploded View

Rooftop Villa Structure

Rooftop Mansion Plans

Rooftop Mansion Sections

Rooftop Mansion Details

Unexpected Encounter

October 13, 2019

Tsinghua School of Architecture | Spring 2012

Undergrad Core Studio

Critic: Xiaoxi Cheng

Individual work

A Multi-Disciplinary Institute with Cross-Programming

X-lab, an education platform in Tsinghua University, is wired with a maker culture with cross-disciplinary cooperations. The Lab gathers students from various backgrounds, encourages them collect fresh ideas emerging from campus life, and forge them into start-up success.

This project argues that in workplaces such as X-Lab that call for an insight into daily life, the need to step outside the boundaries set by professionals themselves overweighs internal compactness. To bring up interactions between the workplace and the campus, this project questions the cliche of visual transparency and direct accessibility with a radical programming model. Enclosed research spaces and open public terrains are juxtaposed, forming a sandwich section. Connections between each of the two series of programs are brought in to create intersections, thus lead to moments of encounters.

The Self-Isolation of Makers

Maker culture plays an essential part in X-Lab. Students reach beyond the boundaries of their own professional fields to work together on fresh ideas, hoping to transform them into business success.

But consider the actual atmosphere in Tsinghua University: Instead of nurturing inspirations in the rich content of campus life, the students who are labeled “makers” would rather keep themselves to workshops and studios. This is actually common in many incubators across the world. X-lab must emancipate students from this self-isolation.

To encourage real life interactions between professionals and the public, two sets of programs, one required by the Lab, the other by the public, are mixed and inserted into each other. In the meanwhile, the connections between multiple programs within each group are maintained. The result is a sandwiching program layout with intersecting circulations.

Collecting Events

Massing & Space Development

Section

Circulations

Scenes of Crossover

Sections

Rendering

Plans

Physical Model

The Sun Also Rises

October 13, 2019

Personal Project | Summer 2015

Partner: Xiyao Wang

Museum as Spatial Translation of a Film’s Narrative

This project investigates the linguistic nature of space to tell a story. It exploits the interactivity of space to expand the narrative into the reciprocity between the narrator and the viewer, and challenges it with open readings.

A museum is proposed based on the film The Sun Also Rises by Wen Jiang. The Sun Also Rises unfolds with a non-linear narrative encompassing four sub-stories weaved between multiple characters. The director plays with misplaced timelines, tangling events, and illusions of tcausality. The film montages the story into a myth. Taking a structuralist point of view, this project embarks on a pure spatial abstraction of the movie’s narrative structure rather than its specific plots. The movie’s key scenes and narrative structure are translated into four spatial prototypes and two lines upon which the museum is developed. Visitors flicker between participants and spectators, thereby interpret the story through their own lenses.

Diagramming Narrative Structure

Each plot abstraction is translated into a spatial prototype, and developed into a twofold:

The lower part is an IMMERSIVE ENVIRONMENT in which visitors play the roles of the movie character. Overwhelmed by immediate perceptions, they experience the story arranged by the NARRATIVE LINE. The upper part provides a review of the scenes from a PRIVILEGED VIEW. This time they become distanced observers while other visitors lingering in the lower part become their subjects. Plots follow the TIMELINE to clarify the events.

Spatial Prototype

Spatial Transposition

Scenes

Redirection & Paragraphing

The Chamber of Redirection is where visitors’ routes are re-coordinated to the sequence of the Timeline.

Bridges reach out of the chamber into the main exhibition sessions, cutting the scenes through, forming mezzanine-like observation points. The observation areas also serve a “paragraphing” function in the museum’s spatial syntax. They separate scenes to create a sense of articulation and prepares passing visitors for the transition ahead.

Chamber of Redirection

Spatial Units & Geometry

Units Model

Assembled Model

Dual Experience: Time vs. Narrative

Visitors experience the museum twice. During the first tour, as directed by the Narrative Line, visitors take the roles of movie characters, bringing themselves into the plots and lost in the intense narrative. Upon finishing the first tour, they are led to the second tour as per the Timeline to review the story. This time they gain a privileged view of the circumstances they were set in moments ago, with other visitors still in their first tour putting up the "play". The dual experience facilitates a dialogue between "actors" and "spectators", allowing visitors to construct their own story.

Sections

San Carlo Unfolded

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Summer 2018

Rome: Continuity & Change| George Knight, Miroslava Brooks, Stephen Harby, Kyle Dugdale

Individual work

Study Sketches

Final Drawing

Ohne Leitbild

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2018

Advanced Studio | Peter Eisenman

Critic: Anthony Gagliardi

Partner: Winston Yuen

New Haven Oak Street Connector Redevelopment as Debilitation of Formal Model

Theodor W. Adorno’s Ohne Leitbild was an argument on conducting art and design “without a model”. It was a criticism of both the abuse of intuitive artistic creation and the totalization of prescribed methodologies. This studio borrows from Ohne Leitbild to challenge urban models from the past, examining them on the urban site of New Haven, and debilitate them with the site’s actuality.

The project site is an interstitial space between the famous New Haven nine-square and the Hill neighborhood, flanked by the Union Station train yard and the urban debris of 20th century modernist architetures, and cut apart by the Oak Street connector. Students studied and applied various urban strategies on the site to form a critical stance towards both the urban models and the city. This led to projects with “weakened models”, as vehicles for a discourse on urban theory. In this specific project, O.M.Ungers’ Lichterfelde project was selected as the driving model.

Oswald Mathias Ungers, City Metaphors, 1976

Oswald Mathias Ungers, Berlin-Lichterfelde, 1975

Model: O.M.Ungers, Lichterfelde

Spine + Rib

Buildings

Amenities

Grid Shifting

Grid Scaling

Building Scaling

Building Merge

Model Analysis

Iterations

Construction Lines from Site

Spine + Rib

Shift by Preserve Buildings

Generic Grid

Generic Building Matrix

Response to Context

Building Scaling & Merge

Grid Shifting & Scaling

New vs. Existing

Model Application & Debilitation

In deploying the protocol of Lichterfelde on the New Haven site, debilitations were carried out as a fourfold:

a). Using the site to deform the framework, instead of imposing an idealized organizational order.

b). Using church street as the spine to achieve cohesion between context and the project, instead of privileging its internal cohesion.

c). shifting the cell placement (the grids), allowing them to blend into the context, but nonetheless keeping their own identity.

d). Redefining the function of the spine and ribs as per the actuality of site conditions, thereby transposing the formal idea of the spine and rib into the organization of circulations on the urban site.

Site Axon

Ground Floor Plan

Plan & Axon Zoom-in

Zoom-in Axon

Physical Model

Imprint of Sound

October 13, 2019

Tsinghua School of Architecture | Summer 2013

Interactive Installation Workshop | Lei Yu

Partners: Le Li, Xiyao Wang, Zijian Zhang, Yi Xu, Lu Zhang

Interactive Shanghai 2013

Monument of Everyone

October 13, 2019

Non-Architecture Competition: Dying | Summer 2019

Partner: Xiyao Wang

Chongqing People’s Square Memory Depository

#possession #identity #zeitgeist #sharingmemory #coexist

Dear Madame,

We are sorry for your loss.

While we share your grief for the passing of your husband, we feel obliged to write in confirmation of his enrollment in the Chongqing Memory Depository project, to which he applied on Aug 21, 2037 with you as his designated fiduciary.

The Depository issues each applicant a container measured 2000x1000x700, as a storage unit of one’s chosen personal belongings. The applicant would curate his selection for what he holds dear, and what he wishes to be remembered with.

Compared to earth burial, we believe this to be a humane alternative to retain the identity of the deceased, and to share his story with the city. The Archive will exhibit the storage units of participants passing during the latest five-year period, with random rotation, on the surface of People’s Square. Your husband’s life will become part of the city’s collective image for everyone to reflect upon.

After the exhibition period, your husband’s storage unit will be delivered to the storage levels underground by his passing date. To revisit his unit in the private memorial space along the Square’s axis, please make a reservation at: www.MonumentOfEveryone.org.

Sincere condolences

Chongqing Memory Depository

Aug 31, 2044

Paperfold

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2016

Computation Analysis Fabrication| John Eberhart

Individual work

Prototyping

Mutation: Adaptive System

Custom Crafted Component

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2017

Custom Crafted Component | Kevin Rotheroe

Individual work

Inspiration: Liquid Interference Art

Recreation with Acrylic Pouring

Acrylic Pouring Final Collection

Digital Transcription & Reinterpretation

3d Printed Moldings

Rockite Casting

Final Panel

Easy Office

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Spring 2018

Advanced Studio | Florencia Pita + Jackilin Hah Bloom

Critic: Miroslava Brooks

Individual work

A Formal Experiment of the Ready-made and Drawing Misinterpretations

In the documentary Brillo Box (3¢ Off), when Andy Warhol is asked why he turned a common Brillo box into sculpture, he casually responded “because it’s easy to do”. Appropriation yields irony which is easily interpreted, but is paradoxically difficult to attain without an alignment of particular social, economic and cultural forces at play.

This studio investigated appropriation, misinterpretation, and abstraction as tools to generate formal agendas in the adaptive reuse of a warehouse building in Culver City into an Easy Office. Students were asked to hunt everyday items and curate them into a collection

to express their sensibilities and obsessions, and convey it through collages. They then compressed the collection of objects into well thought ensembles, and dematerialized them with vacuum-forming. As levels of abstraction goes up, a formal agenda was extracted from each student's work, which was ultimately transposed into an office interior.

Object Collection

The studio initiated with collections of daily items to express a viewpoint, a sensibility or an obsession. My collection focused on streamlined industrial product with highly specific forms. The sharpness, linearity and hinge in these objects implied a tension between connection and exclusivity.

2D Collage

The images of the objects were then composed into collages to inform a formal agenda. The collages here stitched together disparate objects following their intrinsic formal logic, forming a mechanical Frankenstein, where the individual objects fade away into a new collectivity.

3D Collage + Vacuum Form

Ideas gathered from the collages were implemented with real objects. The flattened silhouette as an approximation of original objects were actualized with felts. The 3d collage models were sent under vacuum forming. The result further defamiliarized the daily objects by compressing them into a dematerialized aggregation.

Formal Statement

This abstraction drawing, based on the tracings from the vacuum forms, is the distillment of the formal statement: the dialectics between constitute parts and a cohesive whole. The illusionistic manipulation of outlines and overlays opens up intentional misinterpretation of their 3-dimensionality, guiding the next stage of work.

Collection Expansion and Defamiliarization

Site elements were added into the collection. The tracings of the collected objects were manipulated to disrupt their readings. Lines were taken and misplaced, making their geometries ambivalent, but still hinting the original forms. The linework eventually becomes neither recognizable figures nor completely meaningless abstractions, leaving the viewer hesitant to make an identification.

Developed Surface Drawing

Developed surface drawing is a method to express 3-dimensionality with 2-dimensionality. It was applied to an empty warehouse in Culver City as a vehicle for object application. The interior surfaces of the warehouse were unfolded and used as a canvas for the similar 2D collage process. The ambivalent implication of 3-dimensionality were treated as a spring point to formal reinventions.

developed surface_for diagram_folded.jpg

Drawing for Misinterpretation

The developed surface drawing transposes the formal techniques from the previous iterations onto an architectural site. Item collections from the site were added to the initial collections, and together composed onto the unfolded interior surface of a warehouse. This results in a "technical drawing done wrong". In trying to make sense of the paradoxical readings, geometric mutations were made.

Spatializiing in "2.5D"

The developed surface drawing is built into an actual building in "2.5D". Against the drawing convention of generating 2D as the reduction from 3D, 3D forms here are constructed from a 2D drawing that implies a range of 3-dimensionalities without prescribing a fixed end. The formal statement is thus concretized into an office statement with spatial and programmatic agency.

Office Statement

The Easy Office project experiment materializes as a next-gen concept art studio in which both spatial specificity and synchronized action are allowed. It has two elements:

1. Figures: taken from the collection, defamiliarized into individual work spheres, each imposing an organizational order.

2. Approximations: occupiable surfaces approximated from the figures, non-autonomous and reliant on them take shape, either carrying an figure to extend its identity or cover one to obscure it, becoming the intermediate zone between various work spheres.

The play between the figures and the approximations results in a versatile field that flickers between identifiable forms and fluid aggregations. Small squads of conceptual artists or freelancers find their temporary niches by their preferences and constantly shuffle as projects proceed.

Physical Model

The execution of the model was a continuation of the project’s formal method itself. Molding models were made and reproduced with vacuum-form. Hydrocal plaster were then poured into the vacuum-form negative mold to create the cast base of the model in one monolith. CNC milling were done over the cast to allow for the accurate combination of assorted components to form the final aggregation.

Détournement of Allure

October 13, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | Fall 2017

Advanced Studio | Emre Arolat + Gonca Paşolar

Critic: Kyle Dugdale

Partner: Istvan van Vianen

An Ocean-front Development to Leverage Market Greed for the City

Miami Beach is among the ultimate tourism destinations in the US. The city has been remembered and fantasized for its seashores, bars, clubs, and tropical flair. What underlies all these tokens of Miaminess is its vibrant social life. However, consumerist developments have been gnawing at social life on the beach. Profit drives developers erect privatized luxury hotels and condos, chopping the beachfront into fenced bubbles. Since contributing to the urban life goes against their privilege and profit, beachfront developments are increasingly disengaged from the city.

The most pertinent challenge in our face is not to design good architectures with high quality urban spaces, but to ensure such spaces are respected and maintained as they are intended to by the owners. In other words: can we design a game in which publicness is anchored at the core of profitability, thus invite beachfront developments to play along?

What is Miaminess?

Miaminess is in threat.

While the beach is the most striking icon of Miaminess, the current beachfront developments, mostly luxury hotels and condominiums, work against Miami Beach's public nature. They seclude the beachfront, erect walls against the city, and chew into the sand with hedges and fences. The beach has become the city's last defense of public life, side by side with the most concentrated band of consumerist privatization.

Voluntary Prisoners of Beachfront Hotels

Self righteous developments transformed the beachfront into a heterotopic landscape. While people pay for rooms to enjoy Miami Beach, they venture into the city for social life, even when the Miaminess they are after is right outside. Within the invisible walls of social isolation, they became voluntary prisoners in their paid cells.

Featured

Why look out for fun when you can party at home?

EMBRACE THE GAME

Instead of fighting Miami's beachfront development pattern, the project works with it. Five mix-use hotel blocks each is an islands of varying tastes and lifestyles, manifesting the will of individual owners, whereas the Halo bridges them to achieve a unified gesture and experience. The sixth block, a former parking lot, is transformed as a performance park joining the Halo.

Preserve

Insert

Unite

Public Flow

Ramps, stairs, escalators, and elevators lead people from the street all the way on to the podiums of hotel blocks, and further up to meet the Halo. Program attractors (retails, amenities, etc.) are spread along to keep the flow pumping.

Halo-Hotel Joints

The Halo has its stand-alone program attractors to establish its own presence, not necessarily relying on the hotels.

While the public program attractors of the hotels are profit-driven, the Halo carries three non-profit driven show spaces. They are managed by the Halo's stewarding agency and cater to non-profit driven public events, such as lectures, talks, exhibitions, etc.

HALO: NEUTRAL UNIFICATION

The Halo unifies the individually operating hotels with neutral urban leisure spaces and show spaces managed by a non profit driven third party agency. The Halo's neutrality, reinforced by the performance park offering its independent access & program attractor, facilitates a steady public flow, making sure that cooperating with the Halo scheme stay lucrative to property owners. Public life is thus anchored at the center of profitability.

GROUND FLOOR: CONSUMERIST HETEROTOPIAS

The podiums contain most of the hotels' public programs (reception, retail, amenities, etc.). These are fully managed and operated on an individual basis, and configured to aim at commercial interest. From the ground floor, the project almost fully comply to the current model of development on the beachfront: profit driven consumerist heterotopias independently run by hotel owners.

Each hotel block is designed with a cascading podium bringing pedestrian onto its top, and one or multiple guest-room towers elevated above.

The Halo is broken into several segments on different heights to fit itself onto the site, but the circulation maintains continuous.

Show The Visitors... And The City!

All the show spaces on the Halo are designed with maximum transparency. They are meant to show not only to the visitors within, but also to the city. Even though the content of the shows are not always visible to the people on the street due to distance, a vibrant backdrop with the awareness of "something is up" is enough to lure people in.

The entrance of the performance park sits on the focal point of the Halo. An outdoor theatre allows people to walk up onto the Halo as they enjoy performance events of the city,

Contentious City

October 8, 2019

Yale School of Architecture | 2016 Fall

Post-Pro Design Studio | Edward Mitchell + Aniket Shahane

Partner: Istvan van Vianen

YSOA H.I. Feldman Prize 2017 Recipient

A Maritime Town Scheme to Negotiate between Conflicting Voices

The historic identity of Gloucester, a once renowned New England marine town, is under siege. Global capital is challenging its deep-rooted sense of place while ruthless tourism development rapidly erases local fishing traditions. Rather than forced preservation that inevitably turns the city into a cultural fossil, this plan establishes the Gloucester Maritime Trade Campus as an anchor institution to empower Gloucester with social, economic and political impetus to firmly reinvigorate its identity.

The GMTC reshapes the shoreline with key nodes fusing traditional activities (fishing, logistics operations, boat crafting, and ship maintenance) with novel curatorial/educational practice. It brokers a zero-sum game between tourists, the local maritime community, business development and working class professionals. The resultant social adjacencies are never perfectly smooth, yet strives for a subtle equilibrium, preventing any single interest group from taking over.

My partner and I formulated this project into a comic narrative to show the struggles and reconciliations between various social groups around the township. They argue and complain but get along in the end. People realize that everyone needs each other to thrive, and GMTC, as compromised as it is, is an assurance of a common future.

We infused the narrative with a certain amount of distopic dark humor as opposed to the “everyone living happily ever after” delusion. There is also the pensive foreshadowing of neo-liberalism eventually wiping out everything despite the valiant effort of the community.