TIANLI GU | INTERIOR DESIGN | PRATT INSTITUTE EXPECTED GRADUATION 2023 | SELECTED WORK: 2020-2022
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Fall 2022 Hospitality
Brooklyn, NY 3600 ft2
Chan Chen
A semi-community lifestyle establish introducing a new social relationship among residents through the design of standardized and modular living rooms. The design advocates a semi-community, cohesive, circulated, and clear social hierarchical dwelling space.
The integration and cohesion of the original site language and new design language coexist. Independent but adjacent personal units are aggregated to create single units for residents and arranged together to form the community lifestyle. When these units are placed in the site, their negative space is extracted and programmed as public areas, condensing the independent units on each edge together. Light and illuminate from outside and each unit into the public negative space in the middle, where communication and community life will also occur providing a "cohesion" of space.
This project aims to design a guesthouse for 4 Pratt faculty, staff, students and their occasional guest and 4 Fort Green, Clinton Hill, non-Pratt affiliated and their occasional guests. The design provide them with short-to-mid-term living space and socially hierarchical activity space.
Rubelle and Norman Schafler Gallery located on the west side of campus. The total square footage used for the project is 3,600 +/- square feet [SF] [334+/- square meters [SM].[6 units total, four [4] single occupancy dwellings, two [2] double occupancy dwellings]
[ENTRANCE_II]
[SPATIAL
[FLOOR PLAN]
SCALE: 1/8" = 1' - 0'
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Spring 2021 Retail/Office Copenhagen 2506 ft2 Qinghua Wang
This project aims to create a retail and office space for the brand Cecilie Bahnsen. Since Cecilie Bahnsen as an independent brand has no exclusive stores so far, the founder decided to set up her own flagship store in Copenhagen to provide a much better and more coherent consumer experience. This newly established store does not have a ready-to-wear section as other brands normally do but features advanced customized services to meet the various needs of different customers, inspired by her working experience in a couture house.
Cecilie Bahnsen is a eponymous label founded by Cecilie Bahnsen in 2015 after studying at the Royal College of Art in London and working with couture houses in Paris.
https://ceciliebahnsen.com/information/
1. Black Coated Aluminum
2. Brown Leather
3. Polished Brass
4. Antique Brass
5. Green Ceramic Tile
6. Dark Blue Mosaic
7. Light Blue Glass
8. Pecan Wood
9. White Oak Wood
10. Nutmeg Wood
11. Brown Wool Carpet
12. Beige Marble
13. Green Marble
14. Light Blue Wool Carpet
15. Polished Black Marble
16. Greyish Blue Carpet
17. Black Marble
18. Basswood
19. White Leather
20. Red Oak Veneer
21. Green Rubber
22. Greyish Blue Paint
In this project, the design is no longer based on any digital software like AutoCAD, Rhino or SketchUP. Instead, a pure piece of furniture develops from quick sketches and handwork. A simple curve in the digital world means a lot of labor in the real world. Design is born from this. So a curved arc surface is repeated, and an elegant stool comes into being.
[SINGLE CURVE]
[MAKING CURVES]
[MAKING LEGS]
[ASSEMBLY]
[FINISHING]
When two families must share a house, there is an inevitable question that must be explored: what is privacy and how to achieve it. Do people really have privacy when living in a metropolis like New York? On the contrary, everything about life is closely related to the concept of sharing, sharing sunlight, air, temperature, humidity, water resources and even the space in this case. How to construct an active sharing has become my proposition. Privacy can be achieved through simple but at the same time brutal partitions, but the ensuing isolation of sunlight, air, temperature, humidity and other factors makes the space lifeless. Therefore, in my design, I constructed the socalled inadequate isolation. By subtracting partitions, while still gaining privacy, I created a series of ambiguous boundaries in a space, thereby constructing an active shared space, not physically, but spiritually. Dawn, dusk, hot, cold, dry, and humid, all intangible concepts can penetrate the given partitions and circulate in the entire space. Vitality is introduced to make the space vivid. The house is no longer a place to live, but another living body that can resonate with it.
[LOOKING
Family A:
Mina, William + Hao
Mina is a botanist & organic farmer who works a rooftop farm at Brooklyn Navy Yard. William is a Pulitzer prize winning writer on leave from the New York Times to write a book. He has over 2000 books on a wide range of subjects including large-scale display volumes and some collectible editions that need special cases. They live with her father Hao (who was born in China) He is a collector of contemporary Asian ceramics and loves to cook. He walks with a cane, and finds climbing steps challenging.
Family B:
Mavis, Robert + Kisha & Jaden
Mavis is a documentary film maker who works often for public television. She requires a small screening room. She meditates daily and does yoga. Robert is a chef with his own restaurant on Avenue B on the Lower Eastside of Manhattan. He is also a very good electric bass guitar player. They have two children a girl 8 (Kisha) and a boy 5 (Jaden). They are an African American family.
In terms of spatial arrangement, I splitted the two families on different axes to establish their privacy. Family A gains vertical free space while family B is wider on the horizontal plane. This also gave birth to a different space design. For family A, I removed the original floors and added a structure for the rooms to suspend on the ceiling. Therefore, the recession between suspended rooms and the elimination of columns allow sunlight and air to circulate freely. For family B, the continuous space has autonomy. By retaining the old skylight, the barrier between the interior and the exterior is partially resolved. On the other hand, the shared partition between the two families is designed as a translucent glass brick wall to make money. The two households intervene in each other’s lives by means of light and shadow without interfering with each other. A fragile but special privacy is established.
SCALE: 1/32" = 1' - 0' [FAMILY B] [FAMILY A]
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Spring 2022 Office
Brooklyn, NY 17334 ft2
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Corporations need to change their core ideology. In the past companies were in the business of providing supplies and core objects. We moved away from that to a convenience economy where we make it convenient for you to get what you need. Now we are moving to the empowerment economy. It’s no longer about providing an object or convenience; it’s about giving customers the power to supply themselves. -- Gray Scott, “Futurist”
With the development of mobile technology, the form of the office is constantly revolutionized. As a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening the community through economic development focusing on resilience, the space required by RETI is different from traditional office space. Workstation with employees as the unit is no longer the focus of the design. Instead, what RETI needs is a flexible configuration that can be freely switched between seminar and charrette.
Therefore, I utilized the opportunity of the staircase funded by the Lever House and transcribed such staircase into a open bridge with multiple functions, redefining the programs in traditional office. The boundaries between working, dining, lounging, gaming is rewritten, through the essental bridging of functionalities
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SCALE: 3/32" = 1' - 0'
[9TH FLOOR]
SCALE: 3/32" = 1' - 0'
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Fall 2020 Retail Queens, NY 4467 ft2
Inspired by the landscape design of Isamu Noguchi, the design aims to set up a landscape-like sculptural environment for the Akari retail so that visitors can better immerse themselves in the Akari atmosphere. Take advantage of the profound and tranquil materiality of the stone, a gray space with Noguchi's character came into being, so the Akari lamps with gleams can be more emphasized.
Similarly, the layout of the entire space originated from Noguhchi's sculpture Floor Frame. The large-scale display, as a part of the landscape, just like the highlight moment in the sculpture, also wildly constricts the space. As for Akari, it is almost hidden in the landscape, just like Noguchi’s lunar series, containing within the contours of the grids, reflecting off the felt surface and lighting up the whole landscape.
[FIGURE-GROUND] [BUILDING PROGRAM] [BUILDING HEIGHT]
[NOISE] [TRANSPORTATION] [NOGUCHI'S STUDIO] [HISTORY]
[CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT]
[FLOOR FRAME - NOGUCHI] [HIDDEN GEOMETRIES] [ELEVATIONS]
[SPATIAL STRATEGIES]
[ENTRANCE] [LOUNGE]
[ISOMETRIC - SW] [ISOMETRIC - SE] [ISOMETRIC - NW]
