Serina Song Portfolio by Serina Song

[SERINA SONG] PORTFOLIO 2024

E-mail: hszsong8@gmail.com / hszsong8@upenn.edu

Phone: +1(267)402-0407

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AquaFusion - Clean Water Access Center

Group Work

Teammate: Douglas Wong; Instructor: Dorian Booth

University of Pennsylvania | Graduate School Y2 ARCH 602 Studio Project

Project Location: College Point Boulevard, Flushing, Queens, New York

This project is located in Flushing, Queens , New York, which is designed to be a composite of ' clean water access centre' and ' community related program'. The 35,000 sq.ft. center contains both the equipment and mechanical spaces necessary for water filtration, as well as community related program such as spaces for accessing and distributing drinking water, bathing facilities, washing facilities, offices, events spaces, and educational areas.

The project began with researching the various technologies associated with water treatment and filtration which helps understand the basic mechanics and requirements of the various processes. Far from an autonomous system, the project also considered the relationship between the spaces meant for those that are servicing and maintaining the water filtration systems and the areas to be accessed by the broader public. Positioned on the border of heavy industrial, commercial, and residential urban fabric, the center also managed to negotiate between the specialized equipment and forms of water filtration systems while also creating accessible and engaging public spaces. The Industrial Assemblage are also reconsidered in the context of the program, hybridizing the infrastructural systems with a public facing community-based program.

Georges Braque, Bottle of Rum, 1914

Georges Braque, The Clarinet, 1913

Teammate: Wenny Tu; Instructor: Karel Klein

Every building is a camera, and every beam of light that penetrates a building’s window brings with it the tapestry of images from the world outside. When focused, this light discloses the urban narrative as an image, as a picture. This phenomenon finds resonance in Leonardo’s belief that all worldly things possess an inherent aesthetic capacity that allows them to generate images of themselves. He writes, “Every body fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself.” The walls, floors, and ceilings of our buildings are imprinted with these infinite images, installing the city’s essence within their structure. We move within these spaces, unaware of the occluded visual symphony surrounding us, yet it is there, a secret gallery of the city’s soul.

In this project we used the ideas of architecture as camera and the Situationist dérive as techniques to re-see and re-engage the city. Utilizing several AI network types – StyleGANs, Diffusion networks, style transfer neural networks, etc., we experimented with the ways in which training, and particularly mis-training artificial intelligence produces a kind of image-rich “knowledge” that appears more like an AI subconscious than our familiar, everyday reality. The images that come from this artificial subconscious are oneiric and strange yet have a photographic precision that allows us to see beyond the limits of our own aesthetic reality with great fidelity. And despite the AI networks being used as tools for us to produce images, they persist in having a kind of intelligent and creative autonomy outside of our control.

Design Concept: Archive of Culture & History

The top half is designed to be a gallery that stores time, history, and the memory of downtown LA. The interior design of the gallery space is a mixture of shapes and geometries found in the district. We utilized AI to collect and regenerate a visual symphony that encapsulates the city's soul. Later on, we drew inspiration from the arrangement of space and depth in the AI image for the section design of the Apple Tower Theatre.

The bottom half of this project is designed as an actual archive of books, a library. This forms a contrast of abstraction and concreteness to the time capsule gallery above.

Image taken in downtown LA Adjust AI image training

Exsting building section

Left: Chunk model front site

Right: Chunck model back side

New section design inspired by AI

Image training using StyleGan AI

Archive of time & space for DTLA Time capsule gallery

Archive of knowledge Library

Final output from AI

Space design ideas drawn from AI

Further development of plan

Design Timeline & Strategy

(Right Images)

(Bottom Images)

Stylegan in Google Colab Notebook

From AI Image to Space Design

In this phase, we applied the AI Seed (the final outcome from last page) to the interior wall of Apple Tower Theatre. By doing this, the richness of spaces was taken to the extreme (left image). In the next step, we extracted the spatial qualities and spatial relations in the top image, and kept the richness in our design (bottom image).

Left: AI image overlayed on original section Bottom: New design inspired by AI

Gallery

Left: G Floor Plan

Top Right: Interior Closeup Bottom: Chunk Models 1. Reception

Gallery I

Main Gallery

Stage

Archive I

Archive II

Meeting Room

Male WC

Area

Archive III

Mechanism Room

Bar

Waiting Space

A Sip of Surreality

“The city is my orchard” is a quote from Dan Haslerfounder ofthe The Moss Cider Project. This SocialEnterprise was based in the neighbourhood of Moss Sideclose to Manchester city centre. Apple trees are commonplace in suburban gardens in the city andwhen there is an abundant crop fruit is oftenleft to fall and rot on the ground, going to waste. This project allowed residents to donate their cropof apples to the project, receiving in exchange a highquality,hand made,cider or non-alcoholic juice. Theapples were pressed by volunteers and a proportion of theproduct was sold wholesale to local stockists, providing a desirable artisanal product, supporting the local economy and reducing waste. In spite of being small in scale, projects such as this start to challenge established models of food production, reconnecting food to its locale and with a focus on quality over profit. This design project is conducted in the background ofthe Moss Cider Project, Unlike traditional wine factory, inthis program, the author tried to exposed all the machinesand the working fows to the building utilizers. lt wouldbe like an museum exhibiting the cider-making process. Moreover,the gradual process of exposing themachinery monsters would bring an extrodinaryexperience to the visitors, Starting from showing the footof the iceberg, the space will ultimately put people in ansurreal space with machines surrounding the 3d space.At the same time, people could grab a bottle of cider andgather together with the community.

Individual Work Instructor: Anna

University of Liverpool | Undergraduate School

Project Location: Mossley Hill, Liverpool, UK, L188BX

Project Type: Nursery School

This project is an exploration of aggregated polyhedra which form an infinite field. Through iterating upon the original infinite polyhedra by applying transformations such as stretching and shifting units, we produced a new and dynamic infinite field. By cutting this field using curved faces and the chamber envelope, we created a series of anomaly pieces in the aggregation’s resulting form as well as finalized the separation of two materials: shrink wrap and wood.

Wildest Echoes

Gidman

Activities on Site

Before designing this nursery school, we noticed that various activities with facilities already exist on this site: a community football field, a public art center, and leisure facilities, among others, are already benefiting the well-being of the surrounding district. Our project is not here to disrupt the peace and balance of the existing harmony, but to complement the community. Therefore, this new project is designed to be semi-underground, creating a new center for this area without disturbing the current ecology.

Typology: Openings for Light

As this building is designed as a semi-underground project, the light becomes the most essential element. This page records a series of typology test for openings which aim to let more sunlight to get inside.