BORDERS AND BEYOND BORDERS
with Xingyu Guo
Rather than presenting an overly simplified image of grand architectures as solutions, we shall mean in the first instance to de-engineer the ideal buildings into particles of a larger system that supports the construction of not only physical infrastructure, but also the cultural, spiritual, and virtual infrastructure that is situated in the pivotal point of this urbanism. To this end, this architectural thesis research design is a response to the growing concern of water crises as well as the border conflicts that are generated by the dispute over transboundary resource distribution. The research centers around the hypothesis of resource redistribution in aquatic urbanism, and it culminates in regional planning strategies reflecting on the issue. In this narrative, the aquatic system foregrounds the reciprocity across the multidimensional borderlines between political entities, between cities and villages, and between artificiality and nature. With an infrastructural premise on a regional scale, and government-aided upgrading on a human scale, the 30-year plan experiments to help the city adapt to a new condition, and it helps every one of the households to achieve and even exceed moderately prosperous lives with stall and courtyard economy. The planning re-imagines a living typology consisting of both rehabilitation and construction that externalizes and monumentalizes the power of nature as a human necessity.
KALEIDOSCOPE
with Anwar Abazir, Jiaxuan Tang, Qianling Liu, Zhenrui Mei
Using art, music, food, and mixed local cultures as beads, Kaleidoscope is a thread aiming at integrating the Oakland community that has been polarized based on socio-economic stature. The master plan seeks to create a sprawling hub that attracts artists, locals, tourists, and the city's underrepresented homeless population to demonstrate possibilities of cultural intersection and experience the art-filled, canvas-like streets. The development's paramount objectives are to provide equitable housing and economic opportunities, neighborhood connectivity, and homelessness rehabilitation. Located in the heart of Kaleidoscope, the Oakland Arcade, the former I-980 highway, has been redefined as an urban spine and regenerated into a continuous landscape as well as an integrative cultural corridor through participatory artworks. Beneath and around the Arcade are reconceived mixed housing, art-and-craft bazaars, affordable retail rentals, and community plazas to foster local businesses and the regional economy, with the participation of the homeless population enrolled in the employment training program. Through a plethora of activities introduced, the planning proposal scrutinizes the re-usage of urban dilapidation with financial feasibility, thus exploring the tension between the ideal and the real.
REEF
with Aaron Cass, Jesse Valgora, Stephanie Michell, Vanessa Poe
Reef is a city that exists in the Greenbelt. Suspended above the suburban tree line, the building complex exists as a new modern-day city and the ultimate social condenser that finds its ground in London. The city of London is at a loss for space, for the urban fabric has become full of people and programs, inhibiting it from evolving further. Meanwhile, the Greenbelt was created as a means to contain the expansion of the city of London, but the groundwork infrastructure for the original Greenbelt was not upheld. In response to the incompleteness, Reef proposes a new contract for the Greenbelt, allowing a suburban construct to exist at the same time as the city does, floating above the natural world. The bar buildings slice through the sky, ignoring what is below it, and reframing how a new city can be viewed and utilized for the future.
SEDIMENTARY CORAL
with Klytaimnistra Avgetidou,
Shhrruti Jain, Somin Lee
Coasts constitute one of the most dynamic environments on the earth signifying the transition zone between land and marine ecosystems that are incredibly vulnerable regions. Technically an island, Charleston is one such dynamic coastal city surrounded by the Intracoastal Waterway and comprising of the Bohicket Creek as well as Stono, Ashley, Cooper, and Wando rivers cutting its landform. The county is also home to abundant salt marshes, greater than any other county in South Carolina. The estuary condition and marsh landform, therefore, become critical interfaces during instances of sea level rise and storm surge in the city. Envisioning the future of cities in 2100, Charleston is predicted to experience a 4 feet rise in sea level and severe storm surges. This critical interface between the land and the sea, where Charleston resides is subject to severe environmental forces. At the same time, Charleston has also been an aggressive city since its establishment with artificial superimposition on the natural land and expansion into the sea. Facing accelerating environmental threats, the city may have to consider an opposite approach in which “cover” is the identified strategy proposing “Sedimentary Coral” that coexists with water for disaster protection and mitigation at various scales of the city.
MATTERS OF WASTE
with Raj Perival, Vasundhra Aggarwa
“Matters of Waste” is an urban mass-timber prototype for a resale marketplace, upcycling fabrication lab, and entrepreneurship residency that advocates for sustainable consumption and production practices at the scales of both the individual consumer and the construction industry. It responds to the waste culture in the country and the ubiquitous deteriorating conditions of unoccupied houses in the city of Syracuse. The intersected volumes host programs for collecting, sorting, and displaying donated secondhand goods, while the glass box is an open workspace resembling the factory aesthetic for users to repurpose the goods using small-scale machinery. The verticality and aggregational formality of the building is a critique of big-box stores that are omnipresent in the US and propagate consumerism rather than repairing and upcycling goods already owned. By visually and logically exposing the thorough process of refurbishment, the project aims to evoke more consciousness of the potential of sustainable manufacturing, and it advocates for more thoughtful consumption practices in modern times.
CALL OF THE WILD
- VIRTUAL GAME
with Lulin He, Xinyue Geng
A virtual and physical game about the politics of human activities in a post-anthropogenic era, Call of the Wild explores the shifting concept from Ego, Eco, to Seva responding to the planthropocenic politics through constant reversion of spectatorship of avatars. From the AR gaming design to its parallel interactive projection to the Gowanus area, gamification is an agency of engagement that subverts the traditional energy-consuming and ecologically devastating gaming industry into a sustainable proposal. From the perspective of nature, the architectural realization of the gaming arena acts like a compost bin that becomes a habitation enabler promoting a symbiosis Seva relationship between the local ecological conditions and human activities. While it prioritizes the existing habitation system at its fetal stage in both construction and formal manifestations, this analogical compost bin also physically transforms through time. Therefore, it provides a ground for unexpected growth and an alternative vision of the gaming industry as a critique of the addiction to entertainment in the contemporary era that depletes natural resources.
CALL OF THE WILD
- GAMING ARENA
with Lulin He, Xinyue Geng
A virtual and physical game about the politics of human activities in a post-anthropogenic era, Call of the Wild explores the shifting concept from Ego, Eco, to Seva responding to the planthropocenic politics through constant reversion of spectatorship of avatars. From the AR gaming design to its parallel interactive projection to the Gowanus area, gamification is an agency of engagement that subverts the traditional energy-consuming and ecologically devastating gaming industry into a sustainable proposal. From the perspective of nature, the architectural realization of the gaming arena acts like a compost bin that becomes a habitation enabler promoting a symbiosis Seva relationship between the local ecological conditions and human activities. While it prioritizes the existing habitation system at its fetal stage in both construction and formal manifestations, this analogical compost bin also physically transforms through time. Therefore, it provides a ground for unexpected growth and an alternative vision of the gaming industry as a critique of the addiction to entertainment in the contemporary era that depletes natural resources.
ETCHING ART OMI
Countless fallen-down farm walls in Hudson Valley are visceral connections to the land's past. Through dispersing remnant walls onto the landscape, Art Omi Art Center similarly renders traces of individual acts etched on the vast field. The walls arouse, invite, and guide, evoking spontaneous occurrence of events in both exposed landscape promenades and enclosed confetti units perceived equally as architectural productions. They scale up and down, forming multi-functional landscape vignettes on the etched topography responding to the site around them. They accommodate freedom of interpretation, indulging the four distinct art confetti units with atmospheric variations. The merging point of the walls in the northeast is a threshold from the hustle and bustle to the sanctuary of creative voices, while the fading point of walls in the southwest is the other venture gate to the larger inventory of art collections in this poetic field. In building this exploratory path of etched constructions of the Anthropocene, Art Omi Art Center seeks to form communities of creativity and affirm the transformative quality of art.
CITY WITHIN A CITY
with Xingyu Guo
Situated at the end of Park Avenue, the water research complex is a response to locals' unawareness of aquatic-related emergencies, such as heavy flooding, as well as the urban community’s exclusiveness and self-enclosure. Not only does the project reconnect the river with communal uses by energizing the underused land, but it also highlights the temporality of programs determined by tidal cycles and flooding imageries of the near future, thus producing a test field of a multi-purpose typology that could be applied to other endangered sites around New York’s waterfront. The project resembles a city within the city that is self-sufficient in water usage because of its property of being a living machine to filter, store, and recycle municipal wastewater, and to produce fresh water that joins the main body of the river. The transitional zones, including the research center, temporary housing, and ferry station, are united by diagonal structural members, a single architectural language functioning as platforms, partition walls, and envelopes simultaneously. In all, by adopting an aquatic treatment system as a spatial thread, the mechanical nature of the project seeks to explore alternatives to the current and future built environment under impending crisis.
HARDCORE SUSTAINABILITY
with Estefany Lona, Edson Wong,
Giovanna Veiga, Ruxuan Zhen, Zain Elwakil
Located in Central Park by the pond, the tower is a typical consumerist building model with programs that are usually unsustainable but that are then altered to have high performance, including an aquarium, market, playground, performance space, terrarium, and restaurant. These programs manage to produce minimum to no waste excretion by implementing a continuous feedback loop system in which each program produces the waste that another program needs in order to function and by equipping the aquarium with an algae farm that produces biofuels to power the entire building. The programs extrude horizontally from the main core of the tower, a completely natural and untouched space meant to give access to light and fresh air. The interior of the core is made of porous concrete in which pockets of vegetation can take root, providing a platform for a natural patina as well as other natural ecosystems within the entire structure. In all, this artificial terrain in the form of a tower claims to be an ecological icon that mocks the ubiquitous consumerist practices in the metropolis while exemplifying an alternative cityscape: artificial in its origin but natural in its growth.
RE-INCARNATION
with Klytaimnistra Avgetidou,
Shhrruti Jain, Somin Lee
At the turn of the 21st century, there is a revisioning of the long-forgotten landscape of the Finger Lakes region. The Bell Station site resides in this region and facilitates severe operationalization of the rural landscape. The project focuses on the intangible aspect of weaving through the past, present and future landscapes of the region. A thorough scrutiny leads us to three parameters that play a crucial role in determining the evolving landscape of the area. Firstly, the site locates in proximity to a coal power station, thus it aims to minimize the ecological impacts of the landfill. Secondly, the site comprises three water creeks discharging into the lake, one of which is severely contaminated. Thirdly, even the most optimistic scenarios for the site’s future include extensive solar farms that capitalize on existing high-power-lines, and the intervention target at mitigating the harmful impacts of the solar farm. As a result, the project seeks to speculate a culturally sensitive model that influences how we think about the environment and most importantly highlights the notion of a site guiding its design
TECTONIC
ART CENTER
The project focuses on architectural tectonics that integrates architectural systems at multiple scales into one organic whole. By analyzing a precedent building, projective abstraction of the tectonic strategy is extracted and used for further design development of an art center serving students and locals dedicated to art. This design seeks to apply the geometric repetition of elements from Lovell Beach House by Rudolf Schindler to the tectonic-driven art center. Arrayed components with geometric guidance vary in arrangement, forming spacial intersections that promote more communication between each space. In the context analysis, a primary movement by existing paths and a secondary one by natural factors are found. Both tectonic and circulation strategies are applied to the art center in the expectation that the design is able to reflect programmatic implication in its structural density created by repeated components in multiple scales and to establish stronger connections between programs by both a more direct interior and a more experiential exterior circulation system.
HIP-HOP URBANISM
Hip-hopers were born against the mainstream, and grew to be a subculture. They are rebels who recognize deep in their hearts that no boundary has ever set up restricted territory for self-expression. Thus, they strive. Such is the Woodlawn community in south Chicago which was born in a delicate grid outlining every block and street, regardless of the original topography. In response, pop-up graffiti splashed on alley walls, spontaneous dancing battles happening on empty streets, and desired paths scraping through the unoccupied land all manifest their discontent. While the urban grid implies repetition and unrecognition, the intervention adopts heterogeneity embedded in the local culture of Hip-hop as a critique of top-down planning. In its new revival, street conditions and activities penetrate bounded blocks, liberating the self-centered area with large-scale vacancies into a space of opportunity. Buildings, on the other hand, push the terrains beyond their walls, re-establishing connections with the streets. Mutually, the two juxtapositions are protruding their own territories on the other side. The boundary, therefore, has been shattered.
MINIATURE SERIES
- PEACH HUT
Although the commission asked for a 300-square-meter public building to facilitate Xiuwu county’s culture and art education, considering the vast serving area, the team proposed to divide one building into a series of seven miniature facilities scattered around the county so as to better serve local communities. Through these minimal architectural investments, the project aims to inspire the sensibilities of local residents, to help them enjoy and rethink life quality, as well as to alleviate isolation and poverty. Among these pavilions, the first two that were constructed were the Peach Hut Community Center promoting agricultural sales and the Library in Ruins facilitating students in rural areas. In the Peach Hut, all windows are of diverse shapes, oriented towards different views of the peach blossoms and light angles. On the other side of the village, the library becomes a spatial device where people enter the ruins, jump over the old houses, and gaze into the village, the fields, and the mountains in the distance. In addition, body geometries are then extracted from the miniature pavilions and applied to furniture as well as lighting designs on smaller scales.
MINIATURE SERIES
- LIBRARY IN RUINS
Although the commission asked for a 300-square-meter public building to facilitate Xiuwu county’s culture and art education, considering the vast serving area, the team proposed to divide one building into a series of seven miniature facilities scattered around the county so as to better serve local communities. Through these minimal architectural investments, the project aims to inspire the sensibilities of local residents, to help them enjoy and rethink life quality, as well as to alleviate isolation and poverty. Among these pavilions, the first two that were constructed were the Peach Hut Community Center promoting agricultural sales and the Library in Ruins facilitating students in rural areas. In the Peach Hut, all windows are of diverse shapes, oriented towards different views of the peach blossoms and light angles. On the other side of the village, the library becomes a spatial device where people enter the ruins, jump over the old houses, and gaze into the village, the fields, and the mountains in the distance. In addition, body geometries are then extracted from the miniature pavilions and applied to furniture as well as lighting designs on smaller scales.
GENERATION PANDEMIC EXHIBITION
Graphic Design with Mansze Zhang
The exhibition on the reinterpretation of the Pandemic narrative through children’s perspectives was the opening show for the education-oriented Whittle Museum of Art. Following the curvature transitional structures, visitors are guided by a continuous movement path acting as a thread through three distinct curatorial topics, each of which utilizes different modes of display. The exhibition introduces experiential fragments by juxtaposing sensory qualities of each scene, being either light or heavy, bright or dark, rigid or loose; Yet the three scenes are also integrated by the ever-changing shadows formed by colored films and the interactive content motivating public thinking that together render a vibrant and participative atmosphere in the space.
CIRCULATING MATTERS
with Lulin He, Eduardo Teran, Connor Yocum
The design represents a built outdoor installation that identifies the potential of a future, local circular construction industry in Ithaca, New York. The project directly reuses materials from the deconstruction of 206 College Ave (a 1910 residential structure that was slated for demolition and has been deconstructed instead), reactivating the material qualities and values of the building for the construction of the installation. The spatial design plays on concepts of circulation and circularity by reimagining a staircase as a multidirectional, spatial folly engaging with its materials’ past and future. The design aims to promote a design paradigm that begins from the uncertainties of local material availabilities, and foresees futurities of material and component reuse within industrialized reconstruction.
BIOFUEL NAVIGATOR
This hypothetical study of drone design involves the application of QGIS and Python in determining the optimized outcome. NYC Environmental Collector Drones, powered by CO2-feeding algae biofuel, depart from municipal garages where collected CO2 emission help to charge the drones. Their job is to collect environmental-related data and physical samples in NYC parks and greenspaces that are assigned to each drone based on park-garage distances. The drones continue to navigate closest drop-off points and are set to communicate with one another within a certain distance to exchange samples. The samples are eventually dropped off in research facility sites located by water features where algae farming provides power sources for the facilities to conduct further biological research.