Design Portfolio - David Ling

DAVID LING

Design Portfolio Master in Architecture I Spring 2020

Harvard Graduate School of Design

CONTENTS Zero-Energy Highrise Room for Play House for Two Film Studio Order & Flexibility Paper Folding Modeling Movement 1 Modeling Movement 2 Stephenson Tripod Household Object Untitled Artworks

2 24 44 46 48 50 52 54 56 62 64

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One of the basic human requirements is the need to dwell, and one of the central human acts is the act of inhabiting, of connecting ourselves, however temporarily, with a place on the planet which belongs to us, and to which we belong. This is not, especially in the tumultuous present, an easy act...and it requires help: we need allies in inhabitation.

Charles Moore,

Zero-Energy Highrise

foreward to In Praise of Shadows

Dubai, UAE

Instructors:

Ali Malkawi & Gordon Gill 2019

This project uses the brief of a zero-energy high rise tower located in Dubai to explore the meaning of dwelling and the home as manifested through the built form. The project challenges the dominant real-estate culture in Dubai by proposing a solution that prioritizes the individual experience of the condominium dwelling unit, aiming toward a form of living that enhances the relationship between the inhabitant and place. By replacing traditional HVAC and heating and cooling mechanisms with passive solutions, the apparatus that separate an individual from their place of dwelling are diminished, and a lifestyle more harmonious with the spirit of the place is gained.

The primary thermal design element of this project is an integrated temperature-responsive hollow floor and wall system that exploits Dubai’s prevailing northwest winds. Through radiant cooling, the massive concrete of the floor and interior walls provide a ‘cooling hearth’ surrounding the primary living space. If incoming wind temperatures are cooler than the air within the floors and walls, the exterior dampers will open, allowing air to flush through, thus enhancing the passive cooling potential of the concrete. The computational fluid dynamics software FloVent was used to develop and test the strategy in conjunction with local wind analysis, while physical modeling and photograhy were used to examine light, shadow and atmosphere.

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1.

2.

3.

4.

Structural Cooling 1.

2.

3.

4.

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Cool air intake Mass chilling Warm air flushing Repeat next level

Axonometric

Depicting passive cooling structure

Zero-Energy Highrise

B

A

Structural Cooling Prototype

Polyjet 3D Print, 1:50

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Section A

Wind shown entering floor plenum, flushing through vertical wall plenum, and exiting through floor plenum of unit above.

Section B

Wind shown in plenum between floor plates and in the vertical plenums formed within the structural concrete walls.

Plan

Wind shown to be entering wall plenums in a staggered manner, while also showing wind from floor below to be exiting (as depicted by the abruptly increasing wind speeds at regular intervals).

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Sections w/ CFD Overlay Modeled in FloVent

Wind

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Late Afternoon

Sun position low and westerly

Architecture is the ordering of things through the ordering of matter. A set of values must be laid out in giving mode to this order, and in doing so the act of design becomes inherently political.

Housing and a dwelling are not equivalent. To claim an architecture is a place of dwelling requires taking on a set of values that engages, in addition to programmatic and economic requirements, climate, weather, and a experience

Study Model

Clay & Cardstock, 1:100

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Mid-Day

Sun position directly overhead

simultaneously. In Dubai, these values are gathered together by the relationship to light and shadow which gives mode to the ordering of matter. Light carries with it heat and illumination. The initial contact between light and matter produces space defined by heat and brightness; such a space is limited by the tolerance of the body to such conditions, and is a space that is rather observed through a threshold. Past initial contact, illumination is diffused through reflected and refracted contacts. In this place, the space of dwelling is the space that is designed to be illuminated by this kind of light.

Study Model

Clay & Cardstock, 1:100

Light

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Late Afternoon

Sun position low and westerly

Sectional Unit Model Cardstock, 1:50

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Mid-Day

Sun position directly overhead

Sectional Unit Model Cardstock, 1:50

Light

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Zero-Energy Highrise December 21, 2019, 12:00pm

May 6, 2019, 1:00pm

Light

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June 21, 2019, 5:00pm

November 21, 2019, 10:45am

Elevation

North & West

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Elevation

East & South

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Plan

Typical Unit

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Section

Typical Unit

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[Above]

Floor Plan Typical

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Zero-Energy Highrise

[Below]

Floor Plan - Mezzanine Typical

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Site Model

ZCorp 3D Print, 1:1000

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Zero-Energy Highrise

Presentation Model Paper, 1:300

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Room for Play Instructor:

Jeannette Kuo 2018

Los Angeles, CA

Partner:

Han Cheol Yi

A city is defined by the diversity of its people. Diversity of age, culture, and means of living among many other things.

Such diversity is most strongly represented in the dwelling, as the home is as much a private dominion as it is a practical place of shelter and functions. It must accommodate inexhaustibly heterogeneous modes of dwelling.

Market forces on the other hand tend to generate housing within the city that impose a contradictory homogeneity. This project uses the rigid homogeneity that tends to manifest in the American housing market as a foundational principle to - find heterogeneity - of space, resident background, and modes of dwelling.

This project operationalizes the functional necessities of dwelling by compressing them into a standardized, repeatable and ultimately figural series of ‘programmatic cores’, simultaneously becoming the structure, the mechanical, and the system of ordering that defines the building’s expression; they are the ‘infrastructure of dwelling’. When the machinery of living is flattened into the matter of the architecture, the space in-between becomes the pure domain of the individual.

A space that is almost nothing becomes a space of freedom, a room for play.

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The Volkswagon Type 2 Microbus became an icon of freedom in post-war America, particularly in the the autocentric region along the coast. The Bus is capable of providing the practical necessities for multi-day travel, and is versatile in its ability to be filled with things. If the highway is infrastructure that activates a dispersed urbanism, the Microbus is the infrastructure that sustains life on it. This life is also life-style, where life “on the road” and the romance of one’s life in a container on wheels becomes equivocated with a sense of freedom. The “open road” is inflected with a sense of ownership and possibility when seen as a ‘backyard’ to the microbus which contains the necessities and responsibilities of living.

Seen as a distinctly Angelino sensibility, the Microbus becomes the image of this project, provoking us to re-imagine the concept of ‘emptiness’.

Volkswagon Type 2

Advertisement, 1963

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Room for Play

Segment 2 Unit Plan Segment 2 Partial Floor Plan

[Above] [Below]

Concept

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Floor Plans

Ground, Typical, Terrace

Elevation North

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Room for Play

Site

Downtown Los Angeles

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Sectional Model MDF, 1:50

Isometric

Terrace Levels

Core

Form and order

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Ground

South elevation

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Unit Interior

View from south balcony

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Terrace Level

View from vertical boardwalk

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Ground

North elevation and plaza

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Unit Plan 1/2

Floor Plan

Segment 2

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Room for Play

Unit Plan 2/2

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Presentation Model

Chipboard, 1:100

Section Perspective

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House for Two Instructor:

Zeina Koreitem 2014

A house for two, or two houses in one; this project uses the assembly of basic geometry to produce a single form from two intertwined autonomous spaces. The result is a 4 story dwelling space that attempts to find new forms of spatial organization within the boundaries of a limited enclosure.

Models produced by hand.

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House for Two

Presentation Model

Laminated museum board, 1:50

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Film Studio

Boston, MA

Instructor:

Zeina Koreitem 2017

A film studio is a representation machine. In Boston, it is the architecture of the new economy, taking over a post-industrial site within the seaport district.

This project references the architecture of seminal American factory architect Albert Kahn, re-conceiving the role of the structural element in spaces of production. Here, the structural is exaggerated and oversized beyond pragmatic necessity, becoming simultaneously spatial and figural.

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Presentation Model

Mixed media, 1:200

Sectional Model

Mixed media, 1:75

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Order & Flexibility Instructor:

Katy Chey 2013

While models hold an historical place in the process of architectural design and presentation, when produced after the completion of the project they become didactic tools through the process of 3-dimensional interpretation.

This project is a loose reading - or mis-reading - of Peter Zumthor’s Kunsthaus in Bregenz, Austria that examines the relationship between the rigid ordering system of the grid and potential flexibility.

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Order & Flexibility

Kunsthaus, Bregenz

Presentation Model MDF & acrylic

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Paper Folding Instructor:

Katy Chey 2012

Unexpected and original design can emerge when a technique-based approach is taken towards the work.

In this case, a simple folding technique that produced a tessellation pattern was examined. The result is a sinuous form that protectively wraps two separated spaces.

The sculptural object was folded from a single piece of watercolor paper.

Drawings and models produced by hand.

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Paper Folding

Folded Object

Watercolor paper & salt water

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Modeling Movement 1 Instructor:

Katy Chey 2012

While presentation models in architecture often conceive of the material they are made of as representational of the surfaces of the architecture, in reality representation through model can look nothing like the building, and yet communicate things that the surface cannot. This model attempts to represent the playfulness and choreography of SANAA’s Tokyo Garden and House through model.

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Diagram

Program & circulation

Movement Model

ALuminum wire & wood

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Modeling Movement 2 Instructor:

Katy Chey 2012

While the examination of movement has been used in architecture towards the aim of improving efficiency and reducing space, this project examines the movement of the body through time as something sculptural or figural in a way that is both expressive of the nature of the movement itself but also something takes on an unfamiliar or surprising quality as we look at it and represent it in new ways.

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Image Analysis

Video of rock climber

Movement Model Mixed media

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Stephenson Tripod In collaboration with:

Richard Henriquez, HPA 2018

An aluminum and brass kinetic sculpture. Each element in the assembly, including hardware, has been designed to produce a sculptural gesture that is put into motion by Vancouver’s wind and rain.

It stands ~8’ tall.

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Stephenson Tripod

Vancouver, Canada

Components

Machined and brushed aluminum

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Stephenson Tripod

Details

Counterweight and raincatchers

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Stephenson Tripod

Details

Various

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Household Object Personal Project 2015

A robust and versatile household object (4’x2’x2’). Weathered steel rails act as the structural system, supporting 1.5”-thick planks of solid beetle-infested Maple whose edges are charred.

This object is made exclusively with damaged or defective material.

Work includes design and fabrication.

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Household object

Maple & steel, 4’x2’x2’

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Untitled

Acrylic on canvas, 4’x2

Untitled 2

Acrylic on canvas, 4’x2

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