Portfolio.2024 Howie Li

PERSONAL STATEMENT

An architect can be an artist, an engineer, a sculptor, a politician, a writer. Or an architect can be all of these things. Architects are generalists. We curate and celebrate the space of the world and capture them in moments in time which we call architecture. The art of the architect is the spontaneous authentification of the past, the present, and the future.

“The sun does not know how wonderful it is until after a room is made.”

-Louis Kahn

LANDFORM / LAND ART, “45,000 WORKS”| 01. Coordinated by Professor Gerard Damiani

REMATERLIALIZING THE AMERICAN HOME | 02.

UPHAM’S CORNER BOSTON LIBRARY | 04.

STACKED ECOLOGIES | 05. Coordinated by Professor Dana Cupkova

LE CORBUSIER - “BULL III” | 06. Coordinated by Professor Jose Pertierra-Arrojo

STAGES OF WOOD - YAKISUGI | 07. Independant Study with Yonghao (Jerry) Zhang

Desert

Rust reaches for dirt

Shrubs reach for the sky

Images on the wall are sufficiently temporary

Capturing the clouds never stopped them

The wavy shadows deceptive

Concrete

The steel confesses

The sun will never shine here

Strange veneer at the end of time

The first warmth of a new year

Clouds roll like waves on ice

Lines in the sky fix the earth

Like ice on glass

Mountains on oceans

Will trees remember their leaves?

The pavement their steps?

Will the air dry?

Finally looking beneath the sky

Distant shine against the black mountain

Sunrise like fireflies

Rain on glass

Before the sun meets the horizon, car lights join the fading dusk

In fleeting moments

The world plays its theater

Our sorrows blow where the wind goes

They ask me what I see through the tricksters glass

I am but an old dog

As above so below

The world ends on a quiet weekend

Common ground

01. “45,000 WORKS”LANDFORM / LAND ART

Coordinated by Professor Gerard Damiani

“45,000 Works” explores an interesection between land art and emerging direct CO2 air capture technology through the adaptive conversion of one of the United States’ largest renewable energy sites in McCamey Texas. Drawing inspiration from Michael Heizer and Donald Judd, the project proposes a large experiential center to visitors to traverse an energy megastructure hidden within the heart of the American desert.

Just Outside McCamey, West Texas

This is a portion of the great plains of North America known as the Llano Estacado or Staked Plains. It is one of the largest table lands on the continent with mesa shelves incomprehensible at the human scale. After the raising of the last Cretaceous Sea, these land shelves were polished over tens of millions of years into the level desert we see today. Only desert plants sparsely populate the sand, gravel, and sandstone left by the ocean. This place is largely inhospitable and has been a transitory space throughout human history. Laying at the intersection of the Apache, Comanche, and Jumano territories, the land’s natives would cross this region, but even the nomadic tribes would not dwell here. It is a place where all memory of it remains fleeting.

In the early 20th century, deposits of oil were first discovered and mapped here as part of the beginning of the Texas oil boom. Thus was the beginning of McCamey County, a desert town born from these harvesting fields. Within the void of the desert were suddenly the follies and scars of American industrialization, which would eventually imprint our first known lasting mark on this land.

Since the fading of the oil industry throughout Texas, the state has transitioned into the leading producer of renewable energy in the country. On site are now the Upton Solar power plant and King Mountain wind farm, the second major mark on this land. My work is arranged alongside these historic large scale renewable energy systems.

The advent of Direct Air Capture technology will be humanity’s third mark upon this place. Excess energy from the evolutionary on-site renewables will provide the clean electricity necessary to operate the DAC facilities. Six monoliths will stretch across the mesa and overlook the desert power farm below, capturing, processing, and delivering carbon dioxide to the preexisting pipeline below. This CO2 will then be sequestered in the recently constructed injection sites outside downtown McCamey.

Using the metrics of DAC technology today, largely referenced from the Orca DAC plant in Iceland, a single fan unit of Orca’s size can capture roughly 83.3 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. With the construction of 540 fan units in this work, this DAC facility will capture 45,000 metrics tonnes annually. This is only 7 ten thousandths of a percent of annual US Emissions.

100,000m Above Site

Iterative Site Models

“... you do not go into the desert to find identity but to lose it, to lose your personality, to become anonymous. You make yourself the void. You become the silence. It is very hard to live with the silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. It is very hard in the desert. You must become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear the silence speak.”

Double Negative, Michael Heizer

Photograph by Grace Kolosek

Edmond Jabes

Worker Residential and Visitor Center

Rendered Perspective

Aluminum Conceptual Model

“The unsayable settles us in those desert regions that are the home of dead languages. Here, every grain of sand stifled by the mute word offers the dreary spectacle of a root of eternity ground to dust before it could sprout. In the old days, the ocean would have cradled it. Does the void torment the universe, and the universe in turn vex the void? Roots buried in sand keep longing for their trees. The deepest weep for their fruit. They are reborn of their tears.”

Three Oil Well Silos

Photograph by Author

Edmond Jabes

Visitor Residential

Rendered Perspective Views Aluminum Conceptual Model

After driving hundreds of miles of empty road, one stumbles upon this scarred land in nowhere and realizes that something has been left among the nothings. Nothing that one knew of prior. Places indefinitely distant become consciously close. Do these places exist without us? What is this place and what are things? The innumerable grains of sand are each their own but together are nothing in the desert. The desert singles out the individual with a silence loud enough to drown out the world.

Lone Silo, Somewhere in West Texas

Photograph by Author

Mesa Transitory Space

Rendered Perspective Views

Conceptual Section Model

“We live in a schizophrenic period. We’re living in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously.” Within the land of countless abandoned oil wells stands an endless solar field and commanding rows of wind turbines reaching for the sky. Is this a satire? A manifestation of our time’s false prophecies crying wolf as our savior? Could this be our evils come to life? My direct air capture units are next to keep ever present overwatch upon the desert.

Michael Heizer

King Mountain Wind Farm, Upton Solar, The Remnants of McCamey Oil

Photograph by Author

Rendered Perspective View of Direct Air Capture Unit and Mesa Wind Turbine

DAC Conceptual Systems Diagram

Aluminum Conceptual Model

Fan Unit Detailed Model View

02. REMATERIALIZING THE AMERICAN HOME

Coordinated by

Professor Jeremy Ficca

This project explores the future potential of single family homes in the Schoolcraft Southfield district of Detroit Michigan. It proposes that a housing intervention immersed among an emerging urban farming initiative can reinterpret an immense abandoned neighborhood as a productive live-work space that leverages the nearby industrial district as a desireable asset. It attempts to lay the foundation for an emerging American neighborhood typology.

To the city of Detroit the Davison West site is abandoned, undesirable, and should be paved over to shield the Schoolcraft neighborhood from the Jeffries-Southfield Industrial District (a critical local business node providing hundreds of jobs). However, to local residents who have adapted these blocks as urban farmland, this adjacency is ideal. These farmers, artists, and craftsmen desire a smaller scale of living revolving around interconnected neighborhoods directly invested in their community. They provoke a reinterpretation of productivity, living necessities, and the American Dream.

The prototypical American house can be simplified and rearranged where privacy and program are delineated through vertical separation and street facing hierarchy. More public spaces such as the garage and kitchen are grouped and arranged to engage the street while private spaces are stacked towards the rear of the site. This reinterpretation results in a two part home consisting of a mixed use street side shop space and modest dwelling tower nestled in the overgrown landscape. This organization provides visual and sequential permeability at the street while insulating the dwelling tower. Each parcel is put in visual and productive dialogue with its neighbors while sustaining small, modest, and increasingly private areas of refuge.

This reinterpretation of the house into a kit of two parts also allows for the further aggregation of these parts based on necessity and potential growth across the site. It can revitalizing the neighborhood, generating a new urban edge, and ultimately achieve a new American neighborhood typology.

THE FOSTER PATCH

DAVISON W

GRANDVILLE STREET

UNITY GARDEN

JEFFRIES SOUTH INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT

Both the shop space and tower are built with prefabricated hempcrete cartridges.

These cartridges are structural. The light wood framing consists of corner posts supporting vertical load. Thin wood barriers are sandwiched between these posts to reduce thermal bridging. These cartridges are then filled with hempcrete insulation and clad in a biogenic corrugated panel extruded from waste wood fiber, sugar cane, and hemp.

These cartridge modules in combination with additional light wood framing allow for very simple construction methods. Furthermore, the majority of raw materials can be either grown on site, sourced, or manufactured locally from the neighboring businesses, leveraging the limited resources on site.

The historically excessive American style of bigger, bolder, better has lost its roots in necessity and prosperity. Those let down by this system have come to understand a need for a modest, reductionist mindset based on qualatative purpose over ambiguous quantitative wealth and consumption. Cultural change must take place on the human scale. The cost of living and housing is rising exponentially and becoming increasingly corporatized. Today’s youth intrinsincally live a nomadic lifestyle centered around an unstable, corrupt economic marketplace which has destroyed the nuclear family and the foundations of the prosperity we have today. The heritage of the American Dream has been lost.

The American home no longer represents individual autonomy. Global-style copy-paste suburbs are a consequence of capital driven desires for cheap overseas mass production over quality product. It has ironically led us to a decline in ingenuity and an indoctrination towards the commodification and commercialization of everyday life. Elegance and simplicity in work and purposeful living must balance the business of cities and skyscrapers.

Thus this project attempts to deprivatize usage of the house while staying within the bounds of individual ownership and acknowledging the home as an American economic linchpin. It restructures and reevaluates program to place an emphasis upon purpose building through work, service, and investment in community. It attempts to leverage the adjustability of modular program objects to meet the growth of the surrounding community. And it argues for a preservation of individual home-ownership yet a reallocation of space that facilitates passionate, productive, communal living.

03. “LATTITUDE 40”

In Collaboration with Yonghao Zhang, Sophie Chao, Kevin Yao

Coordinated by Professor Gerard Damiani

Systems and Structure Consultation Team

David Bott, Building Facade and Curtain Wall Structural Glass Specialist, Principle, Heintges Consulting Architects & Engineers P.C.

Shariff Khalje, Building Facade and Curtain Wall Structural Glass Specialist, Principle, Heintges Consulting Architects & Engineers P.C.

James Dudt, Environmental Control and Life Safety Systems, Gilbane Building Company

Joseph Meier, Senior Structural Engineer, Michael Baker International

I.M. Pei’s Washington Plaza Apartments were intended to be a 3-block subsidized apartment complex completing Pittsburgh’s new Center of the Arts and housing the local residents displaced by the project. However, only 1 of 3 blocks were built and the building was adapted for a more upscale clientele, fragmenting the African American community of the Lower Hill district since the project’s conception in 1964.

This project aims to study construction and large scale building systems while reinterpreting a portion of the housing requirements of the original project. It proposes an extension fulfilling I.M. Pei’s second proposed wing where construction was first halted.

SOLAR STUDIES

Several precedents were studied and adapted to our projects as part of the studio’s initial analysis and design development phase. Deconstructing Georges-Henri Pingusson’s Lattitude 43 (1932) in Saint Tropez, we found that the building’s sectional qualities and iconic bent wing were a compelling concept to complete the next block of the Washington Plaza Apartments.

I.M. Pei’s original proposal located this second block just adjacent and parallel to the first, leading to significant shading on the south face. By adapting Pingusson’s sectionally staggered rear corridor and paired unit entrances, the first floor of each unit can be opened, allowing for permeability of air and natural light through its living spaces. Extending this concept to our massing, we addressed the shading of the preexisting apartment block through a similarly bend east wing as well as opening a gap at the corner of this bend.

Massing Option Solar Simulations

Each floor is staggered so that the first living room floor hangs over the bedroom windows of the units below. Coupled with the offset rear corridor, this sectional strategy results in significant daylight autonomy with nearly no glare, as well as a more flexible unit layout that allows windows on both southern and northern building faces. The overhang spaces allow for implementation of an operable sunroom and winter garden to help address Pittsburgh’s much more variable weather.

After testing several facade strategies, we found that a series of vertical fins maintained the original concept of permeability and uninterrupted views through the open plan. Inspired by Glenn Murcutt’s Arthur and Yvonne Boyd Education Centre (1999), our final facade strategy further protects the edges of each unit from glare and provides privacy for neighboring units, projecting and highlighting the interior organization.

Spatial Daylight Autonomy: 73.4%

Average Lux: 1494

Spatial Daylight Autonomy: 95.3%

Average Lux: 1570

Option 1: Closed Northern Face

Option 2: Open Northern Face

WEST ELEVATION

1ST FLOOR UNIT PLAN

2ND FLOOR UNIT PLAN

SOUTH ELEVATION

BUILDING SYSTEMS

The first block of the Washington Plaza Apartments were built to support the systems of itself and its unbuilt pair. Therefore, we chose to follow a similar organization to the preexisting design. Water, sprinklers, and 4-pipe system are run to each unit through a common shaftway and route back underneath the buildings to the existing boiler, chiller and domestic water supply. Greywater and black water are drained through the same shaftway to underground cisterns, as well as exhaust on the roof. Each unit is fitted with its own electric instant water heater so that hot water cost and usage may be managed unit to unit.

04. UPHAM’S CORNER BOSTON LIBRARY

Coordinated by Professor Jeremy Ficca

Supervised by Professor Gerard Damiani

Successful libraries are characterized as sanctions of knowledge and social community building. This project pursues an intersection between a gallery and library to create a celebratory space for people and learning. Composing book stacks through a transparent gallery framework, the intention is to create a space which conceives and displays an appreciation for the interactions between visitors and the knowledge on display while serving as an interstitial visual gateway between the urban street edge and neighboring cemetery. The building becomes an existential exhibition of all and for all.

At 619 Columbia Road lay graffitied trailers and local auto shops. These artifacts make the current boundary walling North Dorchester Burying Ground from the adjacent street of small businesses. Built in 1633, the cemetery is the earliest remaining landmark of Dorchester and the resting place of some of the city’s most prominent founding citizens. Hundreds of shade and rare ornamental trees are planted throughout the site. Light which wanders through the canopies dances with the breeze and speckles across the burial grounds. The site subtly implies a deep connection between the sun, sky, and landscape to its visitors.

The library is composed in light of these metaphors. Constructed of wooden colonnades echoing the adjacent forest and partitioned through translucent scrim surfaces, the single floor parti allows for accessible, seamless visual and sequential permability across urban landscape, library, and cemetery.

A hostel has also been introduced to comtemplate a housing consideration for this project. Following the local triple-decker morphology, a three floor residential block clad in a similar scrim-like translucent facade is put in dialogue with the plane of the library floor to overlook cemetery grounds.

05. STACKED ECOLOGIES

In Collaboration with Brian Hartman

Coordinated by Professor Dana Cupkova

Guided by Professor Jared Abraham and Heather Bizon

This project is an exploration of our seat in the natural environment through a water purification plant, mussel farm, and stacked housing strategy on the banks of Aspinwall, Pittsburgh. Informed and inspired by the Ennis House (1924), the building examines the spatial, formal, and temporal qualities of Frank Lloyd Wright’s concrete textile facade. Privileged views of the landscape are carved from plutonic forms raised from the ground, blurring the boundaries between shelter and landscape where neither condition can exist without the other. Continuing the steel truss logic of the Aspinwall Bridge and combining it with the extrapolated facade forms, the plutonic forms are held in a grid field which acts as support and circulation space. This system is extened over the Allegheny River as docks which engage the free flowing water. Cubic living and working quarters sit above the carved landscape where mussels and water filtering ecologies are planted to clean the adjacent river banks.

Formally, the project acknowledges its own inevitable deterioration and invites the system to juxtapose itself in the flow of time. As the building’s variable spatial scales are planted in the landscape to form the foundations for ecological growth, the eroding and decaying of these forms allow for the landscape to subsequently overgrow the building, cultivating and enrichening the terrain.

06. BULL III - LE CORBUSIER

Guided by Professor Jose Pertierra-Arrojo

Le Corbusier’s “Bull” series (1953) explores the translation of three dimentional spatial experiences and compositions in the form of two dimensional paintings. Through transparency, Corbusier abstracts objects and voids into sillouettes, fields, and contours.

This blending and tiling of sillouette and contour results in a phenomenal transparency that is ambiguous and leaves the final interpretations within the eyes of each beholder. This project dissects these spatial compositions hidden within Bull III in order to recompose Le Corbusier’s work into an a spatial architectural composition.

“The painting is, in this sense, made up of semiautonomous and different spaces, which are described by silhouettes and which interact in various ways.”

Katherine Fraser Fischer (A Nature Morte)

Formal Reinterpretation of Commposition as Recessed Door Handle

“... silhouette explains plasticity: it is the outline of things which explains their volume ... pictures represent objects seen from in front, but their depth is implied in the lines.”

Bernhard Hoesli (Oppositions, Apres le Purisme)

07. STAGES OF WOOD, YAKI SUGI

Independant Study in Collaboration with Yonghao (Jerry) Zhang

Yaki Sugi is a traditional Japanese technique to weather proof and preserve exterior wood cladding by carbonizing its outer surfaces. It can also be used as a finish for various furnitures or to harden wooden tools and other elements. In this independant study, we leverage the heat resistive qualities of charcoaled wood and the ability of glass to capture abtract temporal forms.

Above: Three vases are crafted which capture the charcoaled quality of cedar planks. Placed together, the “charred” faces of these vases frame a central atrium intended to be reminiscent of a cedar log from which the planks were originally cut.

For these pieces, glass was blown into a series of hybrid two-part, dry-wet molds. In order for the molds to properly release such unconventional forms, cherry wood was soaked prior to blowing. This allows for a thin steam barrier to help release the glass and preserve the smooth interior. Cedar planks were then cut, reinforced, then pre-charred to complete the remaining “burnt” face of each mold. After being blown, the cedar is quickly unclamped and pulled away. These cedar sections are kept dry to preserve the yaki-sugi texture and allow for further charring in the blowing process.

Below: A recangular cedar mold is repeatedly blown full with glass to sequentially char its interior surfaces. From this study, we can examine the incremental growth of texture and phenomenal qualities in the resulting vases.