GSAPP Advanced Studio Portfolio Chin-Yu Tsai

CHINYU TSAI Portfolio of Advanced Architectural Design Studio 2016-2017, GSAPP, Columbia University

1

I

META MORPHIC

p.3

2016 Summer Adv. Stduio IV Critic: Mark Rakatansky

II

UNSTEADYSTADIUM

p.25

2016 Fall Adv. Stduio V Critic: Mabel O. Wilson & Zachary D. Colbert

III

UNITED NATIONS

p.51

2017 Spring Adv. Stduio VI Critic: Jing Liu

1

META MORPHIC Envisioning a Future Transformational History of Culture 2016 Summer Adv. Studio IV Critic: Mark Rakatansky & Choohyo Lee

Introduction This studio explores the experimental possibilities of metamorphosis, the transformative invention of spatial form as it is manifest in and through social and cultural formations. We will utilize one of the world’s largest and most legendary collections of cultural form and transformation, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as a site to explore new forms of curatorial and informational spacemaking.

You will metamorphize the Met through a new major 50,000 sf addition to the museum. With the recent development of many of New York’s primary cultural institutions, like Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library/ Museum, Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Lincoln Center, and Jeanne Gang’s proposal for the American Museum of Natural History, the Met is prime for a contemporary evolution. The original neo-Gothic building was built in 1888 along the eastern edge of Central Park by the Park’s co-designer Calvert Vaux, with subsequent building campaigns in 1902 with Richard Morris Hunt’s neoclassical facade and the 1971-1991 late modern expansion by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo. Each of these building projects envisioned and projected an idea of a museum as a form of culture. And now with their contemporary rooftop installations of the Starn Twins’ Big Bambú, Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud City, and Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) the Met seems posed again to project outward.

3

Part 1 - Experimentation For the first part of the semester we will experiment with the ways digital visualization in museum settings may provide groundbreaking opportunities to expand the application and accessibility of new informational systems, animating the transformation of form and meaning in cultural history. Your project focuses on one of the Museum’s diverse collections.

The sellection has its own political formulation and its own formal politics. Already imminent in every artifact in all these collections are deep cultural informational networks that your architecture can draw forth with new spatial and temporal relations.

Unfinished We will also be exploring some of the conceptual issues raised in the Unfinished exhibition (a selection of images from the show is included on these pages) which explores how art works paused in the midst of their process might more evidently reveal aspects of the thoughts and techniques utilized to create their intended effects, as in the exhibit subtitle: Thoughts Left Visible.

We can thus experience them in the midst of their transformative process, performing a meta-level of self consciousness in the formation of their form.

American Commissioners of the Preliminary Peace Negotiations with Great Britain Artist:Benjamin West (American, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 1738–1820 London) Date:1783 (begun) Geography:Country of Origin Great Britain Medium:Oil on canvas Dimensions:28 1/2 × 36 1/4 in. (72.4 × 92.1 cm) Frame: 35 × 43 in. (88.9 × 109.2 cm)

Characters

Totally empty unfinished portion

Background

Story is defined by the unfinished part and hints provided by the completed part.

5

17th A.C. Samurai Armor

17th A.C. European Armor

Cafe

Meji Restoration -18th A.C. Decorative Art Civil War Sino War

Japanese Art After War WWII

Russian Decorative Art

ar oW

ss Ru

19-20th A.C. Japanese Art Lobby

Noguchi & Shigemori Garden

1F Plan

Impressionism Chinese Art Tang Dynasty

Multi-media Gallery Short Section

Japanese Paintings Auditorium Ukiyo-E

Foyer

Japanisme

American Decorative Art

Japanism

Non-Permanent Gallery

2F Plan

3F Plan

Part 2 - Design Evolution The first floor is arranged with several designated approaches and one major sequence. Rather than saying “Entrance”, I would use Approach because either space or exhibition, it is not an isolated volume anymore. The adjacent collections are now being involve in. The major sequence here is arranged to merge multiple events that bind them to a basic time line. The time line is extended from the Arms and Armor, which because war is definitely the important chronical fact that affects most of the modernization event of Japan. Second floor, the major sequence is following also a time based logic, which a mutual influence between Japanese art and European art, finally merge into the “Japonism”, a wave of learning from Japan in America. The Third floor is like a one way end with multiple choices after you wandered through lower level’s exhibition. Here is where the most contemporary Japanese events happens. You can continue your exploration of Japanese culture to the non-permanent gallery of the newest Japanese arts. And then complete the loop by going down through the multimedia gallery where the cutting-edge Japanese artists leads you back to the second floor center. The center of where Japan start to engage the world.

N

0

25 m

7

Short Section

9

Sectional Strategy It is currently an atrium space majorly sandwiched by American Wing, European Art and Arms & Armors. And on the second floor there is Asian collection on the bottom right could be connected.

My design is to create a Japanese wing not simply directly telling you what Japan artifacts looks like, but rather trying to curate a mingled and interdependent architecture contains a permanent exhibition that brings you the multiple stories of how the idea of “Japanese� is formed and illustrated by the interaction to the world.

Long Section 11

Meji Restoration The first sequence here is where Japanese met the western and start their modernization during late 18th to early 19th.

As a curator, I would like to call this period “Physical Contact�, which means while two culture initially meet each other and start to discover each other.

So in this period, I would like to make visitor sense that contact by first align the exhibits in parallel fashion. Within their own culture objects, there will be how they start to depict each other be inserted. At the End point of two parallel lines, is the critical event that happens. Here, the Meji restoration and civil war will be the case.

1F Plan

13

1F Plan

Exchange Art and Objects In order to have visitors sense the interesting changing moments, the artifacts are arranged on both sides of the space, and while those critical or representative exchange happens, the important exhibit breaks out and been brought to the direct front of the related artworks of the other side.

Here we can see the porcelain of Japan here being brought to the front of the European porcelain that were influenced by Japanese ones.

And the adjacent side is where the European one being brought to the Japanese one.

Also there is vertical connection between 1st and 2nd floor. On the rear side, you can see a shelf goes up to the second floor and bring the influential objects of Japan that affect the upper floor European paintings.

15

2F Plan

17 17

1F Plan

19

2F Plan

"Just think of that; isn't it almost a new religion that these Japanese teach us, who are so simple and live in nature as if they themselves were flowers?" -Vincent van Gogh 21

3F Plan

My design is to create a Japanese wing not simply directly telling you what Japan artifacts looks like, but rather trying to curate a mingled and interdependent architecture contains a permanent exhibition that brings you the multiple stories of how the idea of “Japanese� is formed and illustrated by the interaction to the world.

23

UNSTEADY STADIUM Urban Futures/Future Architectures USA 1.0, Detroit, USA Catalytic Detroit: Hacking Infrastructures, Inequalities & Ecosystems 2016 Fall Adv. Studio V Critic: Mabel O. Wilson & Zachary D. Colbert

Introduction Catalytic Detroit radically re-envisions the future an American rustbelt metropolis. Once among the world’s greatest manufacturing cities with the highest per capita income in the United States, Detroit was synonymous with the “future city,” a twentieth century lifestyle of work and leisure made possible by booming automobile production.

Its pernicious decline fueled by racial tensions, financial missteps, and the expansion of a post-industrial globalized American economy have left Detroit the cultural exemplar of a distressed metropolis. Yet, in Detroit, possibility is emancipated from constraint. Imaginative and alternative urban practices hack the city’s infrastructural excess to create new definitions of property, value and public. Insurgent urban farming practices have fueled bottom up community organizing strategies and provided radical solutions to food security while redefining the public sphere.

Billionaires and flows of global capital have been quietly infiltrating Detroit’s boundaries as clandestine land grabs lay the groundwork for multinational players and corporations to speculate on the city’s future.

Distressed urban conditions in Detroit have impelled Detroiters to tap the underground and the overhead, to locate overages and slippages in larger capitalist networks and use them to fuel catalytic possibilities by way of new experiments in urbanism, redefinitions of the public realm and the invention of new architectures. Extraordinary possibilities can be imagined through the projection of these phenomena into the future by asking: “What will Detroit be in 100 years?”

25

Log 01 - Drawing Duration Cities are not static realities, rather they are processes, continuously being invented and re-invented both as material constructs and as conceptual ideas. We will begin our semester by developing representational tactics that capture the fluidity of these processes. By studying films that explore themes of space, temporality, and memory you will be able to use these film maker’s representational logic to begin formulating your own. You will work in pairs to analyze a specific film. Through your analysis you will produce a series of analytical and conceptual drawings and/or animations that document your observations and draw critical conclusions about how space and time are delineated, drawn and mapped. These drawings will articulate the spatial, temporal, and material dimensions of the film, the pathways of movement, boundaries and thresholds. Consider how the film constructs scenes through architectural elements (form, material, space). Also, explore the temporal dimensions of the film, in particular, the use of video, serial images, and repeated forms. Keep in mind how each film attends to the composition of space, along with tensions between history, memory and the cadence of everyday life. Discovery, both in content and representation, will be made through careful observation and research.

The only tools needed to complete this assignment are a web browser, your GSAPP skills, and an attentive, curious mind.

MEMENTO LEONARD TEDDY NATALIE DODD PHOTOS

TATTOS

NOTES

"Momento" The final drawing(s) or animation(s) is a hi-resolution complex arrangement of multi-dimensional vectors and locations that demonstrate a web of spatial and temporal connections. The medium of representation has clearly aligned with the course your research takes you on. That is to say, in architecture, thinking and making are the same activity and thus the product of your research and imagination should embody the character of your discoveries and architects should be continuously testing representational techniques as the think through operative drawings. All of this activity should be assembled into a clear and concise presentation wherein the results will articulate the discoveries through what have been made for group discussion.

27

Log 02 & 03 Modeling Chronoscapes + Chronoscape Model We are immersed in intelligent machines, services and shared protocols that mediate our experience of the contemporary city. Increasingly, urban life is mediated by technology. On demand information and services atomize existing top down infrastructural paradigms and foster new types of individualized exchange. In Detroit imaginative and alternative urban practices hack the city’s infrastructural excess to create new definitions of property, value and public. Social media is a canvas for new forms of society and cultural expression spawning new digitally driven lifestyles and practices. These virtual public spaces offer new possibilities for the birth of and spread of revolutionary ideas, new definitions of collective identity, and new notions of citizenship. Social media has disrupted media infrastructures by atomizing authorship and censorship thus creating a new type public realm. In what ways could these societal and technological trends inform Detroit’s infrastructural future? What existing ad hoc and vigilantly urban practices fill infrastructural gaps? When combined with technological trends, can these individualized infrastructural hacks and strategies hold clues to tomorrow’s Detroit?

The old monetary mole is the animal of the spaces of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control”

29

Detroit, a city with severe inequalities of resource and power. We are dealing a site in the right center of it, which future is forecasted by a very certain plan - The District Detroit. It is planned with 3 major professional sports stadiums, commercial areas and recreation facilities. The properties values and the developments capacities are planned and defined by those top down forces either possess authorities or capital. And eventually the biggest profit, which is generated by the public owned properties, will be mostly returned back to these upper levels. Although these major facilities here are the cash printing machines for those investors, it could be considered as windows to connect local community to the larger financial and social network. The massive amount of mobility happens here could be a break through point that provides chances for local actions hacking into these XL size planning and profiting system and then begin to alter their consequences.

After the bankruptcy and emergency management process, Detroit government has declared everything is backing on track and working positively toward an imaginary future. New investors and corporations came in, “Detroit� has immediately become an infatuated topic and brandable image. But behind the scenes, part of the problematic scenarios is still hidden. Beneath the calm surface, different forces are still tensioned.

Detroit has its solid urban structure, which is capable for many potentials. But this structure was built up on a past glory given by the motor and military industry, which now is almost empty.

For now, authorities are redeveloping Detroit by repeating the old fashion pattern, but we doubt this is the proper way of restoring a city once been emptied out.

According to our site observations, part of the hidden scenarios was revealed. We identified 4 major forces that is consistently grabbing their own territories inside Detroit, which are Urban Farming, Art Appropriation, Race Tensions and Land Investments. All the top down powers are imagining a revival of Detroit, but the reality of local life in Detroit has nothing to do with this imagination. Therefore, so far Detroit has become a city looks like a city, but not function as a city due to this gap between planners and planned areas.

We believe the new Detroit is not a replicated past glory, but the future of Detroit should be kept transiting by the balance between 4 major forces for further few more decades. Therefore, as an architect, we should definitely participate the progress with a flexible attitude toward this dynamic urban situation.

31

Site - the border of midtown and downtown Detroit

33

Envision the city future “We must now see our urban society as a dynamic field of interrelated forces. It is a set of mutually independent variables in a rapidly expanding infinite series. Any order introduced within the pattern of forces contributes to a state of dynamic equilibrium-an equilibrium will change in character as time passes.” -Fumihiko Maki The three logs have studied how Detroit’s infrastructures, systems and urban process that have transformed the city and its architecture have undergone radical changes over the past 100 or more years. These planned changes have been implemented to forge vast inequities and injustices— this was the logic of modern urban development. At the same time counter visions to these impositions imagined a city that was just, free, and fair. Tapping into the transformative forces (both local and global) that have taken place on your respective sites, project those trajectories 100 years into the future to imagine Detroit in 2116AD. Furthermore, through the three logs, you have developed inventive methods of representation to work through your thinking and design process.

Use your futurist speculations to further develop your representational techniques and your critical position on the city. What is the status of the built environment in 100 years (new modes of transportation, energy, social relations of class, race, etc.)? And what are the tools used to shape urbanism in 100 years?

Identify two forces from your chronoscape animation and two forces from your chronoscape model—density, tension, elasticity, attraction etc. With these four terms develop a database of images (demonstrative of transformative processes) that reflect their performative dimensions. For example, if you term is “elastic” find various images of forms, materials and processes of elasticity (be inventive with what constitutes and represents these terms). These will assist in the translation of past forces to future forces that will make both the architecture and remake the city in your proposition. These terms along with your body of experimentation and research in the three logs will comprise the assemblage of forces that will evolve into Detroit 2116AD.

JAN

FEB

MAR

APR

MAY

J

JUN

NHL, 3rd, Atlantic Average attendance: 20,027 Team Payroll: 78,450,427

MLB, 2rd, AL Central Average attendance: 33,654 Team Payroll: $173,813,750

JUL

AUG

SEP

OCT

NOV

DEC Hockey (Red Wings) @Little Caesars Arena Baseball (Tigers) @Comerica Park Football (Lions) @Ford Stadium NFC, 3rd, North

Chronoscape Animation

Average attendance: 61,347 Team Payroll: $150,212,803

Maximum Condition of capacity: 120,202 ppl 2015 Detroit Total Population : 677,116 ppl

18%

of city population

35 35

37

STATE GOV.

>6 $ DETROIT 4$

30 $

TAX INDIVIDUAL INCOME TAX

TAX

LABOR OTHERS

ILITCH

PRICE TAX PRICE

TICKET 134$

UTILITIES HARDWARE

FACILITY PROFIT

FOOD 30$ PARKING 40$

BEER 10$

“Our cities are fluid and mobile. It is difficult to conceive of some of them as places, in the real sense of that world. How can an entity with no discernible beginning or end be a place? It is certainly more apt to think of a particular part of a city as a place. If it were possible to articulate each of the parts of the city more adequately, to give qualities of edge and node to now formless agglomerates, we would have begun to make our large urban complexes at least understandable, if not ’imageable’.”

39

Phase 3

Phase 2

Phase 1

Little Caesars Arena Completed District Detroit Complete

2017

2036

Phase 1 Open Space

Phase 2 Facade

2066

Phase 3 Main Facility

100 Years

2116

A Dynamic Proposal Here we propose a dynamic spatial value exchanging system that interfere into the existing profitable area of the stadium on site. The basic scenario is that the private developers of the area will be given certain years of concession period to own the total control of the developments. After that, developer has to gradually release certain amount of the “surface rights� of designated areas by following the given schedule, which allows exterior re-appropriation happen without damage the original profiting system. The ultimate goal will not be asking the developer to give up the ownership, but instead asking them to release spatial right and values back to the public in other way.

41

43

Event Court Yard

Beverage Service

VIP Lounge / Bar

View box

Tailgate Party

Level 4. Plan 0

10

N m

45

Commercial Exchange

Stdium Seats

Court Yard

Farming Unit Dwelling Unit

Level 7. Plan 0

10

N m

47

Stdium Seats

Dwelling Unit

Work Unit

Level 11. Plan 0

10

N m

49

UNITED NATIONS What About Infrastructure ?

2017 Spring Adv. Studio VI Critic: Jing Liu

Intoduction Inspired, or rather aroused, by the sequence of events that followed the AIA president’s corroborating response to Donald Trump’s proposal of the half trillion infrastructure project, this studio intends to envision a series of part architectural part infrastructural projects under the assumption that many of these “crumbling” infrastructures might become obsolete in the near future. Think of the high line of the future, and more.

Infra- Below Structure- The arrangement of and relations between the parts of something complex Archi- To begin, rule Tecture (Greek: Tekton)- Craftsman, learned man Infrastructure is the underlying and basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society. In its organizational nature, it is almost always partial and hierarchical. It benefits those who have access to them, and puts those who don’t at a disadvantage. It is territory defining. It can hardly be an end in itself unless territorial expansion is treated as an end in itself.

Architecture is, on the other hand, the commander in chief in building or crafting something of value, something that requires higher skills to achieve. Architecture carries meanings and passes them down from generation to generation through physical forms and narratives accompanying them. It is only defined as such when it is achieved through a learned process. Architecture is enabled by the surplus of the society and funded by those in power - this, can be a small group of people, or the larger part of our society.

51

A D E C

EXTRATERRESTRIAL A Syria War, 12m B Civil Conflict in Colombia, 5.8m C South Sudan Civil War, 2.2m D War of Iraq, 1.9m E Repression in Burma, 0.9m

100%

100%

2016 Field Budgets by Rights Group Currently, year-end statistics for 2010-2016 are available space of refugees number is 300 millian.

Security from Violence USD 318.4 M

6%

Fair Protection Processes USD 333.0 M

6%

100%

OPERATIONS

70%

30%

Prioritized Unmet

B

Favourable Protection USD 234.8 M

4%

Regional Support USD 92.4 M

2%

Operations Support USD 526.3 M

Durable Solutions USD 341.4 M

10% 2%

Leadership USD 123.5 M

6%

Self Reliance USD 562.4 M

10%

6%6% 4% 2% 10%

15,000 15,00 00 ABANDONED 200ppl/ 200p pp pl/ Oil Rig 3,0000,000 3,000 00,000

39%

61%

41%

59%

50%

70%

50%

30% %

54%

2% 6%

Basic Needs dss and Essential Services e ervices USD 2,968.8 .8 8M

85% 1 5% % 15%

10%

Annual Expenses USD 5,501 M

48%

52%

By extended definition, extraterrestrial could means something beyond mankind already-explored frontier, something that is going from the known in to unknown. This doesn’t necessary means we need to look up into outer space, but actually the unknown is not that far to reach. By pointing out this ungoverned, less developed area, we are actually re-looking at our world like this map.

This map is showing so called “international water” which its sovereignty currently belongs to no country and non-governed. If we consider UN international water convention on the law of sea as merely a convention.

In this free zone, or some official documents call it “high seas”, we found those who are mostly not-allowed, not-accepted, or forcedto-leave from the existing human main territorial action, which is setting our foot on the dirt of our mother earth, could actually take advantage of this not-so-new world to human. In this case, we can see two extreme cases under this condition. On one hand, those people who are facing challenge of war, conflicts, drastic climate change or tyranny of homeland are considered being expel from the existing society.

[International Water]

[Territorial Water]

[Land]

1:2000

A

B

C

D

Medium More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one -not industry, not government -- is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows. The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing.

SL +22,000 Plan

SL +17,500 Plan

SL +8,500 Plan

Top Plan

SL +17,500 Plan

Section

1:150 Section

E

F

Reconstructions Here are some examples of how can new dwellers could utilize the limited and cheapest resource extracted from the ocean garbage at the initial stages. For example, the currently biggest problem of environment and also the not-to-mentioned one is the clichĂŠ of the usage of recycled plastics materials.

By stating the story stage by stage, here we can see the section of before and after of the imaginary occupation of the oil rigs, vessel gathering and the new platforms been created as extension context of this new sovereign.

Nature Unit Axon

Residential Unit Axon

Residential Unit Section

Nature Unit Section 55

B

A 12,400

C 21,060

D 13,250

E 21,060

F 12,400

11,360

1

Service / Entrance Core

2

37,120

Temporary Residencies

Public Area

11,360

3

4

1:200 SL +8,500 Plan

SL +8,500 Plan

Engine Space Foyer

B

A 12,400

C 21,060

D 13,250

E 21,060

F 12,400

11,360

1

Working Space

2

Dining Hall

37,120

Swimming Pool Central Circulation Communal Lounge Garden 11,360

3

4

SL +22,000 Plan

57

59 59

61

ct2752@columbia.edu +1-626-213-4849 tw.linkedin.com/in/chinyutsai/