Architecture to me, is inherently anchored in its both spatial and social context. The process of making architecture Is translating immeasurable to measurable by manipulating architectural from with re-defining its elements that based on the old With the use of architectural space, materiality and way of construction, the measurable expresses itself that evokes spirituality memory which are immeasurable.
It is more than just buildings as a structure for physical environment, it is also a magnifier for social factors, a voice for marginalized groups, and an apparatus for issues that we are facing together.
In this portfolio I would like to express my critical point of view to contemporary architectural development and urbanization through my academic and professional experiences, attempting to seek for new possibilities of architectural and urban forms through new meaning imposed on older ideas.
Amalgamated Dwelling | Shanghai City, China Academic Studio
The Path
Goverment Building
Summer 2023 Academic Studio
Independent work
Instructor: Dongfang Xie, Jason Chen
Site: Shanghai City, China
Design Description
The form of government architecture often reflects the government's understanding of its own positioning. Some of them regard themselves as service providers, some as managers, and some as rulers.
Western societies often combine civic centers with government offices to form buildings called city halls. In China, government buildings are usually independent and closed to the public. At the same time, they have a lot in common in architectural forms, they are majestic, symmetrical, reflecting the majesty of the ruler
The project is an office building designed for the Shanghai Municipal government, based on the issues of space and power, government and people, to create a new type of government building to adapt to the future social development.
"A building should be able to transform people: to act on its occupants, to help control their behavior, to facilitate the proper exercise of power over them."
——Michel Foucault
"Public architecture is first the representation of power, then the category of beauty, it is the tool of power, powerful architecture can achieve the effect of making people respect and surrender."
Rites of Zhou, an ancient Chinese book written more than 2,000 years ago, closely linked the construction of architecture and city with social class. The highest power means the grandest architectural form. Architectural hierarchy, as the core part of ancient Chinese Grand Manner, has influenced the form of Chinese architecture and city for thousands of years.
The Forbidden City is the highest achievement of ancient Chinese architecture, representing the supremacy of imperial power, and its magnificent shape has shaped Chinese people's direct impression of power architecture
Contemporary Chinese government buildings inherit many features of ancient power buildings, such as symmetrical layout, wide steps at the entrance, and celebration square that separates the building from the city... The government buildings have become a unique type of building in China, and they must be the most majestic buildings in the city.
Within Sight but Beyond Reach
Power buildings around the world also share some commonalities,they use techniques such as giant structure, symmetry, square, step, proportion and centrality to shape the authority of architecture and create a sense of psychologica and psychological distance. The lofty sense of architecture implies that people should maintain a reverence for power.
So, how to break these?
The site is located in a central business district of Shanghai, an irregular quadrilateral land.Different from traditional Chinese government buildings, the designer cannot plan a large area isolated from the city in this high-density area. The building will no longer emphasize the majesty and power. The building must embrace the city and the citizens. The building will exist here with a completely different attitude.
The repeated elements in the building create a sense of order.
Elevating the building's position and shaping the sense of ceremony.
The orderly proportions of the facade make the building solemn.
Providing visual focus, the building acts as a regional hub.
The most common design technique to create a sense of solemnity.
For the celebration, and the building is also separated from the people.
Symmetry
Stair
The building outline simply responds to the site.
The first floor of the building serves as the civic plaza.
Determine the location of peripheral structures.
The building is raised to form a civic square at its base.
Volume deflection weakens the sense of order.
The roof serves as a second civic plaza.
Put in two paths to connect the two plazas.
Path tracks are evenly distributed throughout the building
The distributed nucleuses is used as the supporting structure of the pathes.
Meaning of Path
In order to ensure that the citizens on the ramp will not disturb the office, the path is designed as a tubular structure, resulting in an upper and lower path. The upper path provides the office staff with a means of transportation other than the stair elevator, and the lower ramp is for the citizens to visit, during which people have an improper surveillance of the power building’s inside.
Eight Nucleuses
Two Civil Plaza
The upper ramp is used by the internal office staff, which breaks the isolation of the various levels and achieves the extension of the space.
The public can enter the building through the pipe ramp and see the operation of the government work as a monitoring mechanism.
The civic splaza at the bottom provides a shelter from the elements and accommodates various activities.
The core tube serves as a structural component to support the main body of the building and the internal ramp, while some core tubes provide service space as a means to regulate the internal homogeneity of the building.
The building hopes to present a visual feeling of lightness and transparency, rather than the sense of weight and power brought by traditional government buildings. The facade material is made of high-light glass, which maximizes the view of the internal activities in the public.
Sunken Plaza
Demonstrators
West Elevator
Southwest Aerial View
Top View
The Building Surrounded by Demonstrators
Thickness of Spacial Interface
Amalgamated Dwelling
Spring 2023 Academic Studio
Independent work
Instructor: Peter Ye
Site: Shanghai City, China
Design Description
In the recent coronavirus outbreak, people had to work from home to avoid being affected by the virus. In the post-epidemic era, working from home has gradually become widely accepted. Many large companies, such as Windows and IBM, provide employees with the option of working from home for one or two days a week as a corporate welfare, and small companies can save money by working from home.
For young middle class workers in big cities, or digital nomads living in different places who have not yet started their own families, telecommuting can mean long hours of solitude, which can easily lead to a sense of isolation from the outside world, which can induce many negative emotions.
This project is a collection house for these remote workers, hoping to create a systematic space design method through the study of the spatial interface in the building, organize a new living mode suitable for remote workers, and create a co-living and co-working community.
"Form is neither the end of itself nor the result of design, but only the means of design."
——Colin Rowe
In classical architecture, in order to satisfy the formal integrity of each space, there is an entity called poche between the Spaces. Inspired by this, I realized that there exists a medium called in-between between adjacent Spaces, which is a residual space enclosed by the space surface, and the change of in-between will affect the relationship between adjacent Spaces. I named in-between after the thickness of the spatial interface, and divided it into three types, which were defined as the solid thickness, cavity thickness and virtual thickness , so as to establish a group of layered Spaces
Middle class workers in big cities often choose houses because of supporting facilities or safety and other factors, but they usually can’t afford renting the whole apartment, so co-living becomes normal. The apartment units would be divided into smaller units, and the shared space such as kitchen, dining room are awkward since they’re either over empty or over crowded. So it’s hard for the residents to communi-cate with each other. Most people just go back to their bedroom
Behavior in Collective Life
Interface Study
For daily telecommuters, most of the day's activities will take place at home, and there should be a more nuanced division between public and private behavior. I wanted to create a set of layered Spaces, establishing a hierarchy from private to semiprivate to open, as a response to cluster living.
The poche in the building makes the external environment imperceptible and reinforces the sense of isolation of the space.
The space is nested and permeated with each other, and the transparency is reflected here.
The spatial relationship is further blurred , only weakly defined by the top contour and the ground material.
The design hopes to respond to the functional theme in the form logic, which can provide a collection of housing for public life, so the geometric logic of the superimposed basic units is adopted.
Direction One Unit Combination
The local deformation of the wall under the grid system defines the thickness of the three spatial interfaces to meet the needs of different functions.
The wall uses poche to respond to the outline of the furniture , and contains more architectural elements close to the human scale, becoming an ambiguous existence between the furniture, the envelope and the structure.
Direction Two Unit Combination
The wall and beam are regarded as two sets of systems , which sometimes overlap and sometimes disintegrate, essentially as a design technique to create a sense of interlayer transparent space.
Two units in different directions are overlapped. A directional unit block retains only the first layer of space, and the second layer becomes a frame. The deepening design of architectural space causes the change of architectural form
There are two shared work spaces in the building, which can be divided into six sub-areas, some of which are double-height Spaces, separated only by the limits of beams and paved floors.
These formal techniques will be used as a corpus to participate in the overall design of architectural space.
Extend Line 10. Convert to Texture
Overlap
1.The Beams on
It
"Substance Thick" "Cavity Thick" "Virtual Thick"
Different spatial relations correspond to different behavior activities, and the level of space is thus generated
The living Spaces permeate each other and exist as semiprivate Spaces
The bedroom suite with bathroom is the most private space in the building
The Spaces belonging to the different occupants are in this collection, defined only by beams and ground materials
The terrace becomes a place for communal living.
The building organize a new living mode suitable for remote workers, and create a co-living and co-working community.
The sight passes through spaces, the transparency is reflected here.
Beams Indicate the division of space and region
Exterior View (Front Elevartion)
The main body of the building uses three materials: fair-faced concrete, blue brick and glass to form a layered facade effect.
Exterior View (Back Elevartion)
The facades with different orientations take different forms of opening Windows, suggesting the overlapping of the various Spaces inside.
The Collision between Old and New
University Student Center
Winter 2021 Architectural Design Competition
Independent work
Instructor: Sheng Gao, Huihua Xiong
Site: Yiyang City, Hunan Province, China
Design Description
In the past two decades, China's cities have been in the rapid development of large-scale demolition and construction, and the face of the city is changing rapidly, but it is becoming more and more unfamiliar.
My Alma MAter,Hunan City University, where study, is a microcosm of this social process. Ten years ago, the school changed its site due to development needs. The old campus, which bears the memories of teachers and students, is about to be demolished after several years of dereliction.
This project is a student center designed for the Alma mater, which aims to provide a place for students to exchange and rest. At the same time, facing the problem of the disjunction of the campus context, I hope to establish the connection between the new and old campus with my design, create a sense of dramatic conflict to attract people's attention, and the building will face the future as a monument to record the progress of the school and arouse people's reflection on the current development.
"Monuments are symbols of the collective will expressed by architectural principles and are the primary elements, the fixed elements of urban change."
——Aldo Rossi
Hunan City University, was founded in 1978. Due to the development of the school in recent years, the old campus has been unable to meet the demand for education. The school moved to a new campus in 2013, but the old campus, which held the memories of teachers and students, was sold due to debt problems, and everything about the school's past seemed to exist, and the new campus had no context to speak of.
To design a building in the new campus as a tool to weaving the history of the new and old campus, and to recall the past in the new building or site, I hope that it will become a building that goes straight to the intuition and expresses the continuation of history and time in an architectural way.
The old campus is located on a hillside with five main academic buildings, and the central granite steps serve as the core element of the campus layout. hope to extract the environmental characteristics, architectural symbols and other elements of the old campus, translate them into a new landscape architecture, place them in the new campus, as a memorial to the past, and build a dialogue between the new and old campus. The building site is located on the central axis of the campus, and students will pass through it for daily classes, which is the location with the largest flow of people on
Architecture as a Tool for Weaving History
Main Teaching Area
Dormitory Area
SITE
The New Campus
The Old Campus
Collage and Reconstruction As a way to connect the past with the present.
1. The site is a long and narrow sloping land with a height difference of 5m from east to west.
3. Diagonal lines divide the site, giving it a visual sense of fragmentation.
5. The square is covered by a large student center building, which creates a spatial tension at the bottom of the building.
5. The building opens holes and people look down through them, the sculpture presents an archaeological intention.
2. The site was transformed into a six-level platform in response to the old campus' central stepped walkway.
4. Insert small sculptures symbolizing the old building , the site became a memorial square for the old campus.
6. The suspended cable structure gives the building a sense of floating and enhances the spatial tension.
8.
Symble New Form Installation
Material
Collage images from different angles of the same object is used to inject "timeliness" into the picture. In this way, the teaching building of the abandoned old campus is reconstructed and placed into the new campus as a memorial.
The irregular perspective in the painting brings a surreal viewing experience, and the design uses diagonal elements to guide the audience to the solid line to
Four staircases connect the student center above with the plaza below.
Mystery and Melancholy of a Street Giorgio de Chirico
Self-portrait
David Hockney
Little Theatre (from the Old Sports Hall)
The main features of the old building are the red and blue tiled facade and the cylindrical staircase, which are now integrated into the outdoor small theatre.
Sculpture I (from the Old First Teaching Buidling)
Some structural elements of the old building are reconstructed into a new sculpture, the main surface material is granitic plaster, and some green Mosaic tiles.
Sculpture II (form the Old Laboratory Building)
Some structural elements of the old building are reconstructed into a new sculpture, the main surface material is granitic plaster and red brick.
Sculpture III (form the Old Library)
The main features of the old building are the mosaic tiles in various colors and some funny structures, which are now integrated into the Sculpture.
Sculpture IV (form the Old Second Teaching Building)
Some structural elements of the old building are reconstructed into a new sculpture, and the main surface material is red, blue and white tile.
1. Little Theatre (fromthe Old Sports Hall) 2. Sculpture I (from the Old First Teaching Buidling) 2. Sculpture II (from the Old Laboratory Building) 3. Sculpture III (from the Old Library)
Sculpture
The building has no support structure other than the central column, which creates a sense of instability in the bottom space.
Local patios connect the upper and lower Spaces, while enriching the light and shadow expression of the lower square.
The sculpture is covered by the top building, a form derived from the borrowing of archaeological imagery.
The student center "floats" above the landscaped square at the bottom of the old campus, as if the past had been buried by a powerful force majeure.
Steel angle
Stiffener plate
Live load connection steel mullion
Glass
Drapery and head track 10. Steel Beam
Concrete on metal deck
Insulation under radiant floor system
Concrete topping
Sheating
The suspended cable structure gives the building a visual sense of floating and gives the bottom space a sense of instability.
The outdoor theater provides a place for performing and meeting, and has a positive effect on the integration with the central square of the campus.
The design consists of a square at the bottom and a student center at the top. The square bearing the image of the old campus is covered by a large slab building with metal skin , a form that borrows from archaeological imagery, as if the old and new collided as if the past had been erased by a force majeure. The suspended cable structure makes the building seem to float on the square. When people are placed in the bottom square, they will feel a certain sense of instability and pressure. These spatial and visual feelings together constitute the commemorative character that the whole design hopes to convey.
It is an intuitive building that recalls the old campus that no longer exists.
Little Theatre (Sports Hall)
Sculpture II (Laboratory Building)
Sculpture IV (Second Teaching Building )
Sculpture I (First Teaching Buidling)
Sculpture III (Library)
North Elevation
Formal Metaphor
Xinzhong Road Bridge
Vehicular Bridge
Winter 2021 Working Item
Collaborator: Yue Xu
Chief Architect: Bin Zhang
Site: Shanghai City, China
Note: All drawings presented are individual works. The physical model is produced by the model making company. Construction is under way.
Design Description
This design project belongs to Youdungang Canal renovation Project in Qingpu District of Shanghai. In order to meet the increasing shipping demand, Shanghai Municipal government decided to widen Youdungang Canal, and all the vehicular Bridges in the section need to be demolished and rebuilt. This project is the first bridge from south to north in this section and is adjacent to the southern ship lock
The bridge is located in an ancient town, which has undergone decades of destructive development and half of its land has become an industrial park, but there is still an ancient temple built in the Tang Dynasty on the east side of the bridge. Dealing with the relationship between the bridge and the surrounding environment will be the core of this design.
"Simplicity is not the end of art, but we usually get it when we get close to the essence of things."
——Constantin Brancusi
The east side of the bridge is an industrial park, and the west side is a centralized residential area supporting the factory. The bridge bears the main responsibility for the daily work of the residents.
The bridge that will be demolished in the future
The angled single arch serves as a frame for the distant tower, echoing it in the distance, and overhangs the landscape walkway above the river, where people can watch the passing ships and the nearby ship lock
Arch Bridge with Double Arch + Extra Path
Arch Bridge with Single Arch + Extra Path
Arch Bridge with Single Arch
Arch Bridge with Double Arch
Stayed-Cable Bridge
Arch Bridge
Fish Ridge Bridge
Our previous analysis confirmed the basic form of the single arch + extra path of the bridge. After research, we confirmed the formal logic with fusiform shape as the motif, and carried out a series of Boolean operations to make the bridge shape present an overall sense.
1.The fusiform object at the bottom contain the extra path.
2.The fusiform object at the top contain the single arch.
3.A Boolean operation is performed between the fusiform object amplified in equal proportions and the upper fusiform object.
5.Cut in an arc to get the extra path.
4.A Boolean operation is performed between the fusiform object amplified in equal proportions and the upper fusiform object.
6.After analysis and demonstration, the position of bridge cable is determined.
7.Get the final shape of the bridge.
In this bridge scheme, the asymmetric design of the bridge arch is adopted, and the gradual change of the Angle and direction of the bridge cable presents a dynamic visual feeling, which is more light. Standing at the end of the bridge from the west to the east, the inclined arch of the bridge echoes with the distant pagoda in the line of sight , and the overhanging landscape footpath at both ends of the bridge is enlarged into a platform for residents to relax, carrying so many leisure activities of local residents.
Eventually the bridge becomes an integral part of the landscape and the lives of the residents.
Southwest Aerial View(Physical Modle)
Southeast Aerial View(Physical Modle)
North Aerial View(Physical Modle)
West View
View from West to East
View form East to West
Biphasic four lanes, three walking paths.
05 OTHER WORKS
01.Changning Road Post House
Nature: Work Item at Atelier Z+ Site:Shanghai
Participation Content: Construction Documents Design Project Status: Have Been Built.
Located in Changning District, Shanghai, the building is based on the renovation of a rural selfbuilt house in the 1970s. The original two-storey brickconcrete structure retains the first floor foundation while the second floor adopts a newly built wooden structure. As a park station, the building provides a place for citizens to rest and contributes to the park environment.
The site used to be the largest cement factory in Asia, and now it is transformed into an office park, which is completed by a number of architectural firms. Atelier Z+ is responsible for the design of four buildings, which retain many features of the original industrial buildings in the form language, and retain part of the structure of the old buildings. It is hoped that through the collocation of the new and old buildings, Create three-dimensional layers in the sensory and physical dimensions of time.
The four buildings are in the charge of Atelier Z+
Facade I
Facade II
03. Xicen Railway Station
Nature: Work Item at Atelier Z+ Site: Shanghai
Participation Content: Construction Documents Design Project Status: Have Been Built.
The roof of the building adopts continuous triangular folding surface to simulate the fluctuation of water waves, and at the same time, as a space truss, with the facade of the structural unit to form a strong sense of sequence and identification of the image, so as to achieve the integration of form and space. Section Roof Plan
05. Clark Art Gallery Physical Modle
Physical Models Made for Tadao Ando's Architectural Exhibition
Material: PVC, EPS, PMMA
Size: 400mm* 400mm* 50mm
Curator: He Art Museum (Shunde China) Tadao Ando Architecture
Time: March 2021
06. String
Installation for Construction Festival
Material: 2m* 2m PP Plate Sheet, Nylon Cord
Size: 4m* 3m* 2.5m
Time: October 2019
Design Concept: The design hopes to build a small building without cutting the board. Taking advantage of the physical characteristics of the board that can be bent, we use nylon cord to pull the board into an arch, and the arch is the unit to complete the construction.
