DAVID CHENYI
This portfolio presents a curated selection of my academic and creative work, reflecting my development, design thinking, and evolving process as a student at Pratt. Through each project, I strive to explore new concepts, experiment with form and function, and communicate distinct spatial narratives. I am thankful for the mentors, peers, friends, and family who have supported me throughout my design journey.
Floating Vessel+ Attachment
Sustainability: Repurposing shipping containers reduces construction waste and gives new life to surplus industrial materials, minimizing the carbon footprint compared to traditional construction.
Compactness & Structural Integrity: Containers are inherently modular, stackable, and designed for transport. Their compact size allows for a clean, space-efficient layout while ensuring durability in harsh marine environments.
Ease of Assembly & Mobility: Their uniform dimensions make them ideal for prefabrication and on-site modular assembly, reducing time and energy spent on construction. when properly retrofitted, they can be made buoyant and flood-resilient—critical for aquatic or flood-prone environments.
Scalable Living: Families can start with a single vessel and attach new modules as needed—for additional bedrooms, workspaces, or specialized rooms.
Autonomy and Connectivity: These extensions can function independently or remain connected via modular bridges or docks, offering flexibility in privacy and communal living.
Dynamic Community Formation: Units can cluster into communities, detach temporarily, or reconfigure spatially depending on social or environmental needs.
Public Floor Plan
The cylindrical silos, inspired by diatom structures, act as communal hubs and embody the biomimetic design ethos of the project:
Measurements-46’ Diameter- Public Space, 27’ Diameter- Connection Structure
Storage silos are cylindrical structures, typically 10 to 90 ft (3 to 27 m) in diameter and 30 to 275 ft (10 to 90 m) in height. They can be made of many materials such as wood staves, concrete staves, cast concrete, and steel panels. Silos can be unloaded into rail cars, trucks or conveyors.
Floating Habitat:Vessels
The interior of each floating residence is designed to balance comfort, modularity, and ecological responsibility, with a focus on functionality within compact living spaces. Drawing on the form and function of cargo containers, the homes use recycled shipping containers as structural modules allowing for efficient prefabrication, transport, and environmental sustainability.
Material Usage:
Recycled Steel Frames: The core structure is built from repurposed steel shipping containers, providing durability and rigidity while reducing construction waste.
Bamboo and Cork Flooring: Renewable and water-resistant materials like bamboo and cork are used underfoot, offering a warm, tactile contrast to the metallic exteriors.
Marine-Grade Plywood and Aluminum Cladding: These materials are used for cabinetry and wall finishes, chosen for their light weight, resistance to humidity, and long-term resilience in a marine climate.
Triple-Glazed Windows and Skylights: Natural light is maximized through strategically placed openings that offer expansive views of the water while maintaining thermal efficiency.The doors of the containers are kept as shutters for windows in case of storms/ strong winds.
Floating Habitat: Dwelling Exterior Renderings
Bridging the individual dwelling vessels and public silos are a series of cylindrical modular bridges that serve not just as circulation routes but as multi-functional ecological platforms. These bridges are inspired by the organic adaptability of sea moss and the interlocking symmetry of diatom shells, and are designed to function as both community gardens and docking stations.
Each cylindrical bridge module incorporates shallow planting beds and integrated irrigation systems, transforming them into floating gardens. Residents can grow herbs, vegetables, or native aquatic plants, encouraging a self-sustaining lifestyle and fostering communal stewardship over shared green space. These gardens serve as:
Connector Bridge View Perspective of Dwelling
Vessel View
Birdseye View
Connector Green space
Connector Bridge View
Drawings
At the heart of the residence is a central garden void—a dramatic architectural gesture that slices vertically and horizontally through the two-story structure. This garden serves as an integral spatial device that splits the townhouse into two volumes, bringing light, air, and vegetation deep into the core of the home. Acting as a visual and environmental anchor, the garden mediates between the private and communal zones while blurring the boundary between interior and exterior.
The residence features a carefully choreographed series of openings that frame views, invite light, and promote natural ventilation, turning the building envelope into a dynamic, responsive skin. From circular windows that offer focused glimpses outward to linear glazed cutouts that stretch across the rammed earth walls, each opening is strategically placed to enhance spatial experience rather than simply provide illumination. These apertures create a dialogue between inside and outside, drawing the landscape inward and allowing shadows, reflections, and breezes to animate the interior. The contrast between solid, earthy walls and transparent, light-filled voids establishes a rhythmic interplay of mass and lightness, privacy and openness.
Hallway into Hobby room
Hallway/ Sliding doors into garden
Flower Shop
This project was designed for BloomAgainBklyn, a Brooklyn-based volunteer organization dedicated to reducing social isolation by repurposing discarded flowers into meaningful arrangements. Their mission centers on fostering intergenerational connection, hope, and dialogue through the power of giving. The design concept embraces impermanence and beauty in decay, drawing inspiration from wilted flowers—echoing the organization’s ethos of transformation and resilience. The material palette features distressed wood, oxidized metal, and delicate structural framing reminiscent of bare deciduous plants in winter—symbolizing a dormant but vital stage in the natural cycle of renewal.
client
First Floor – Workshop & Preparation Space
This level serves as the operational core, where volunteers gather to repurpose flowers into bouquets for distribution to hospitals, elder care homes, and homeless shelters. The open, flexible layout encourages collaborative work and transparency in the mission.
Second Floor – Community Café & Garden
Designed to engage the broader public, the upper floor hosts a small café and indoor garden. This space encourages conversation, relaxation, and community engagement while supporting the organization through donations and visibility. The presence of living plants offers a counterpoint to the floral decay below, reinforcing the cycle of renewal.
The interior is divided across two functional floors:
First Floor Workshop
First Floor Workshop
Second Stairwell
Second Floor Garden/ Cafe
Second Floor Garden
Materiality and Atmosphere
Distressed Textures & Warm Tones
The consistent use of aged wood, corroded metal, and raw concrete evokes an intentional roughness—mirroring the wilted flowers the organization revives. The textures carry a quiet dignity, emphasizing beauty in imperfection.
Red
Thread Installation
The intricate web of red cords suspended from the ceiling introduces a powerful visual metaphor—interconnectedness. These threads reference veins, stems, or communal ties, casting dynamic shadows that animate the space. It creates both a canopy and a narrative line, tying the upper and lower spaces emotionally and visually.
Ceiling Sculpture
The dramatic, folded wooden structure above suggests petals in decay or crumpled organic matter—a physical embodiment of the project’s themes. It becomes a sculptural sky, abstracting the organic and framing the spatial experience below.
Circular Opening & Stairwell
This organic void acts as a transitional moment between levels. The red railing feels almost like flower stems or vines climbing up and down, reinforcing the vertical flow of life and energy between work and rest, production and reflection.
Indoor Garden with Black Framing
The quiet, nocturnal feel of the garden space adds to the sense of isolation and tranquility. A tree at the center becomes the symbolic anchor—growth at the heart of the community.
Cafe Rendering
Experimentation Models
Sectional Drawings
Reclaimed wood plays a central role in the material identity of the office, serving as both a sustainable choice and a narrative device. Sourced from deconstructed buildings and salvaged timber, the wood introduces warmth, texture, and a sense of continuity with the past. Its naturally weathered surfaces, grain variations, and imperfections are intentionally preserved, adding depth and authenticity to the space. Used across flooring, wall cladding, furniture elements, and the sculptural spiral staircase, reclaimed wood contrasts beautifully with the more industrial finishes like tile and recycled plastic. Beyond aesthetics, its presence embodies the project’s core values—reducing material waste, celebrating reuse, and reinforcing a design language that is rooted in ecological responsibility and material storytelling.
Color and light are choreographed to support cognitive and emotional states throughout the day. Drawing from marine ecosystems, the palette features gradients of soft blues, deep greens, and warm neutrals, selected to reduce stress and enhance focus. Task areas are brightly lit with daylight and supported by energy-efficient ambient lighting, while retreat spaces use dimmer, more immersive tones to support mental restoration.
Collaboration Area (2nd Floor)
Private Offices/Quiet Work Pods (2nd Floor)
Private Pod/ Bookstore (1st Floor)
Private Office (2nd Floor)
Bookstore (1st Floor)
Meeting Room (2nd Floor)
Workstations 1 (2nd Floor)
Office:ILFI
Ensuring that every employee desk has access to daylight is a core design principle. Workstations are strategically positioned near windows, and desks are oriented to maximize exposure to natural light. The extensive use of glass walls and the incorporation of transparent or translucent materials in dividers contribute to the permeation of daylight throughout the entire office space along with access to viewing into working areas such as the material lab and fabrication lab.
Floor Plan/ RCP (2nd FLoor)
Floor Plan/ RCP (1st
FLoor)
This entry-level environment combines a bookshop, quiet meeting pods, and a sculptural spiral staircase, creating a multi-functional public interface that supports knowledge, retreat, and circulation.
Collaborative area design
Detail Design: Collaboration Area
The rear wall serves as a focal point and a celebration of materiality. Layered wooden contours wrap around black terrazzo-like insets, evoking geological strata or underwater formations. Turquoise tile mosaics reflect light and contrast beautifully with the earthy wood tones, while bursts of organic red wall art introduce a floral motif that punctuates the scene.
Detail Design: Curvature
Biophilia Collaborative area
The Biophilia Collaborative area gives a space for employees to sit and work in groups of 4. The large couch seating with plant life allows for more casual, non-desk work. The biophilia structure looks forward towards the fabrication labs and material labs’ open glass walls, giving employees the opportunity to fuel creativity by seeing others work.
Sustainable materials like compressed plastic are transformed into hanging sculptural forms that double as acoustic panels, reinforcing the project’s commitment to circular design. The color palette, pulled from underwater ecosystems, anchors the office in tones of blues and greens, cultivating a tranquil yet focused atmosphere.
Perspective Drawing:
Section Drawing:
Unfolding
Year: June 2023
Status: IllustrativeDrawings
This project investigates modularity and transformation through a structure inspired by a box that breaks into multiple interlocking pieces, all of which can be reassembled into a compact whole. Drawing influence from the architectural office Nemestudios—known for their conceptual approach across buildings, installations, and speculative design—I produced a series of illustrations that reinterpret their visual language. Key elements from Nemestudios’ work, such as the use of X-ray views, varied lineweights, and layered collage techniques, were employed to explore the spatial logic and graphic potential of the disassembled and reassembled form. The result is a speculative study of form, assembly, and architectural storytelling through drawing.
The interlocking parts of the box were reimagined as architectural components, unfolding into a series of rooms, balconies, and bridges; each piece maintains its identity while contributing to a larger spatial narrative.
Bunker
Set within the Hudson Yards subway station in 2025, this pop-up exhibition reimagines a familiar transit hub as an immersive vision of a speculative future. Visitors enter a bunker from the future, where a post-apocalyptic New York has driven humanity underground, transforming the subway entrance into a vision of a dystopian future and a disruption of their commute. This project raises awareness about the escalating threat of global conflict and the proximity of humanity to self-destruction, using the concept of the Doomsday Clock. An idea of how events in life add on seconds to a metaphorical clock where reaching midnight means the end of humanity. This is to provoke reflection on the consequences of war and the urgent need for peace.
Site Study
The Hudson Yards subway station was a site choice chosen for Its architecture—particularly the long, deep escalator descent—
The Hudson yards subway has three entrances entering the platform, one of these entrances is the setting of the site . This route leads visitors down long escalators through multiple layers before reaching the subway platform.
I chose this site because I wanted visitors to build emotion and ponder about the ideas of nuclear warfare. projections of events causing the doomsday clock to reach midnight is displayed on the walls I wanted the visitors to feel a tension building and give time for people to wonder what is waiting ahead as they descend the escalator.
View of Introductory Area
Fictional Site Drawings
Mapping of Site Surrounding
View into Bunker room
Projection Forest, Stage Observation
This pop-up exhibition reimagines a familiar transit hub as a vision of a dystopian future. Rather than passively presenting information, I wanted this project to be an interruption to the public through narrative design, material experience, I wanted the experience as a warning and an invitation. Through the hierarchy and levels of the subway site itself. I wanted to create a psychological toll of disconnection from the surface, from nature, from peace. And by interrupting through sudden change, I wanted people to rethink what kind of future they want to inhabit and appreciate the present.
The design uses cold, hard materials—such as raw concrete, distressed metal, and rebar—to emphasize the discomfort of underground life. These textures evoke claustrophobia and emotional detachment.
But layered onto this bleakness is an unsettling beauty—projections of artificial nature: pixelated forests, synthetic sunlight, digital birdsong. These elements simulate what’s been lost—offering both relief and reminder.
The effect is haunting. Nature becomes a ghost in the machine. It’s a mimicry of the real—comforting in appearance, but hollow in substance.
Projection Forest
Exhibition showcase drawings
Perspective change of aperatures
Exploded Drawing
Axonometric Drawing
Materiality
Projection Change: Seasonal
Drawings Circulation: Floor Plan:
As visitors circulate through the exhibition, they peer through shifting apertures, strategically placed holes and large observation windows into rooms where actors perform daily life in the bunker. These living dioramas gradually become more visible, revealing the routines, tensions, and adaptations of subterranean existence.
The experience is further deepened through a themed dining area where guests can eat as if inhabiting the bunker, blurring the line between observation and participation.
An adjacent exhibition space showcases artifacts of this imagined future, combining tactile displays with wall-scale projections that simulate artificial seasonal changes. Through sensory design, spatial storytelling, and theatrical immersion, the project redefines how we experience underground architecture—as both refuge and reflection of the discomfort of life underground.
Section Drawings
In my research my design draws from ideas of multiple buildings. My spatial language draws from Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, a case study in modular, plug-in living. Each capsule was a self-contained unit, efficient, minimal, and replaceable— much like what a post-collapse future might require.
I translate this idea into a minimised rooms for each program. What is a requirement a necessity in a bunker. along the walls, with each holding a slightly different performance scene—each a study in adaptation of how the survivors live. Each room is observed and transforms into a story. Newspapers cover the wall for story, personal belongings lay sprawled in the rooms. You as the visitor observe what it is like for a survivor to live in this environment.
Seasonal Projection Exhibition
Projection Forest, Stage Observation
Concept Collage
Bloom&Brew
Set on 191 smith street, this bar reimagines traditional Chinese medicine for contemporary young audiences, offering a vibrant yet tranquil space that fuses health, herbalism, and relaxation.
Guests can experience pulse diagnosis to receive personalized herbal wine and cocktail recommendations tailored to their health needs.
By harmonizing the serenity of Chinese medicine with the excitement of nightlife, the space transforms drinking into a journey of cultural discovery and wellness.
Group Members:
client status year location
Teahouse Renderings
Bloom & Brew Bar/Teahouse
2024 191 smith street Brooklyn, NY, 11201
Judy Liu, Yinuo(Sophia) Zhao, David Gu
Bar Renderings
Analysis/ Material Planning
Project Drawings Schematics
Our group collaborated on developing a comprehensive set of architectural plans and drawings for a proposed project. The work involved coordinated efforts in conceptual planning, technical development, and final presentation documentation.
Longitudinal Section
Schematics
I focused on detailed elevations, sections, electrical layouts, and sectional studies, as well as producing renders and contributing to the BIM model.
Sliding Door Detail
Sliding Door Detail
& Ceiling Detail
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