Architectural Design I

Brian Orser: In an abandoned power plant, a matrix of suspended walls are cut by a series of voids, generating variegated light and space. Activated by movement, the voids recalibrate the viewer’s relation to consumption.

Calvin Liang: Overlapping forms in response to site and movement | The co-mingling of architecture and landscape fosters a relationship with agriculture both as a practice and as an experience.

Claire Hicks: Woven Program | This project explores weaving as a formal and organizational strategy for simultaneously housing both a public market hall and a private cooking school.

Christina Zhang: BEYOND THE WALL is a school-supermarket situated on top of a wall that divides up a high-end residential compound and an informal township in Cape Town, South Africa. The two programs are packed into a scaffolding set up along the wall, with a communal courtyard in the center. Without ever actually touching the existing wall, this building dissolves the division by bringing the outlines of houses to the other façade, reminding each community of what’s beyond the wall that divides them.

Together, the iconographic facades, the communal courtyard and the physical action of crossing the wall itself hope to convey one message - Even with the wall, the institutional or municipal framework, people could find their own paths to move around it, occupy it, trespass it, and find a shared space over it.

Jessica Kim: An oblique world // exploring the subversion of oblique surfaces to imply movement and procession

Jingyuan Qiu: Central and Peripheral | Central rooms are defined by different floor and ceiling heights (instead of enclosed walls) to maximize spatial openness. Peripheral corridors with varying wall porosity ensure privacy.

Joshua Tan: Folding // Unfolding investigates sectional representation as both the generator and the organizer of form and space. By manipulating the plan and folding them as sections, new formal inventions emerge. These volumes are constructed modularly and pieced together according to their propensity towards the programs of daycare and teaching center.

The project is subsequently unfolded to assess the project in terms of its sectional complexity rather than its planimetric organization. The multiplicity of levels, the positioning of light wells and the interconnected branches create well lit spaces that allow interconnectivity without sacrificing retreat.

Lilly Agutu: Jazzing up lace with a series of hula-hooping performance art spaces.

Sarah Kim: Concept model closeup | A kit-of-parts consisting of curvy massing blocks are configured within a 9x9 grid to produce varying spatial contestations and compositional languages for two competing programs.

Brandon Brooks: Material study for a spiritual center in Shenandoah Valley.

Katie Colford: Still life of structure with compost.

Sangji Han: Algorithmic study of material and movement through space.

Suhyun Jang: Model photo revealing the relationship between suspended structure and tiers of plant life.

Caroline Kraska: Study of potential materials deformation through combustion.

Abraham Mora-Valle: Model showing atmospheric effect of the play between material and shadow.

Dominiq Oti: A thread of analysis derived from the (Plan, Unplanned) project demonstrated an overlap of research and thinking process towards a site in New Haven. The project titled 235 Winchester Ave is depicted through collage assembly. The collage process is used as a way to explore ways to design with found sites and materials.

Andrew Spiller: Model photo of the blended light projected from the colored mylar sheets.

Audrey Tseng Fischer: Annotated site plan from human perspective in 2050.

Tian Xu: Narrative concept sketch.

Claudia Carle: Transformable Interstice - Transparent fabric ellipsoids delineate soft boundaries for small markets and job training classrooms within an old New England mill building along the Sugar River. The intersection of two movable fabric forms provides a hybrid, third space.

Lauren Carmona: Buoyant Architecture - A floating structure that houses a children’s aquatic center nested within a fish market that is placed in the Sitka Harbour.

Lauren Carmona: Buoyant Architecture - A floating structure that houses a children’s aquatic center nested within a fish market that is placed in the Sitka Harbour.

Yushan Jiang: Orders in Order - The project regards columns as the generator of space, exploring the critical relationship between the interior and the exterior, the stability and the mobility.

Morgan Anna Kerber

Morgan Anna Kerber

Veronica Nicholson: Design as Play - a kindergarten and small museum generated with the nine-square grid

Kevin Steffes

Yang Tian: The City Zipper – It functions as an inserted apparatus/equipment that plugs in gaps between two residential buildings. All plug-in units are used in mixed content: music venue, common usage, and agriculture spaces.

Yang Yue: Enjoy my candy house.

Lindsay Duddy: ‘A Space for Critical Thinking’ was designed to provide an environment in which knowledge could be freely exchanged. The formal characteristics of the design began with a study of light and shadow and the disruption of a light as it navigates through a system of physical barriers. The physical elements of the design attempted to utilize the light study through an almost literal appropriation. The generated interior spaces were then reexamined to facilitate dynamic relationships between the individual planes and the voids created in between.

Chocho Hu: A gradient from jollification to tranquility can be found in the section of the site—busy commercial street, energetic residential district and silent cemetery. A spiritual center is introduced to provide a sequence which references how Japanese gardens gradually bring inner calmness and tranquility to visitors. Different thresholds and programs in the sequence purify visitors’ minds and lead them into “another world.“

Zhanna Kitbalyan: Pushing against the neighboring buildings, the project houses a daycare, a job training center, and interior courtyards. The poché of the interior walls articulates the daycare as a group of round spaces in the middle of the plan, while the job training center forms a continuous ribbon around it. Blending of the interior and exterior spaces and an overlay of two circulation systems create an impression of distinct worlds nestled within one plan.

Shentu Wenzhu: The Community Hub

Diana Smiljkovic: The acquisition of knowledge in the library in which words and letters become the input is complemented and confronted by artistic expression through the activities of the arts workshop. The interplay of the programs is highlighted with the use of the grid and the curve. The lines transform from walls to furniture to openings and roof lights. This constant undulation creates an architectural landscape.

Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen: A set of three primary figures intersect and overlap to produce an eccentric plan that hosts a wellness center and a daycare within the center of the block. Spaces are mediated by specific conditions of the corners. The building sprawls within the urban block while its logic is inherently finite through rules of rotation and intersection.

Hao Xu: This project aims to represent the drawing “Untitled” designed by Cy Twombly via an object. This object is both representational and physical. Inspired by Cy Twombly’s work, the Displaced Vision focuses on how to re-construct multiple perspectives which were implicit in the drawing, and to represent the overlapped figures in a 3D way with more spatial strategies. The Displaced Vision is made of two parts. The bumpy white figures on the black grounds reflect the original content, but it was deformed with the shift of different new perspectives. The other part of the object, the stripped pattern, reveals new perspective angles and builds these conceived perspectives into three-dimensional volumes. The new object with folded form reverses the sequence of a vision which was seeing to mind, to the mind to seeing. These displaced visions would be conceived first, and then represent with a specific perspective. Like the Twombly’s drawing, it reflects its content in dialectic ways, consistency and variation; the stable and unstable; uniform and disorder. But it is different from the drawing; it extends the contradictions of the drawing with more three-dimensional formal strategies to represent the drawing with implicated spatial hierarchy.

Paul Meuser: New Haven Bubble Center - In celebration of the yearly wave of airheads admitted to ysoa including me, this project aims to provide a void in the city of new haven in which one’s empty brain can linger. It provides many programs such as a complaint about architecture corner, an all nighter non sleeping domicile and a space out auditorium.

Audrey Hughes: This market and children’s education center serves as a meeting point between the land and sea agriculture economies on the island of Rhodes, Greece. The section model reveals the curved double-height bubbles of education program–inspired by the geometry of artist Frank Stella’s work-slicing through the market infrastructure and opening up towards the ocean.

Zishi Li: Final Model for Pinball, 2019

This vertical gallery in Kumamoto’s Kamitori Arcade is a spatial translation of Haruki Murakami’ novella Pinball, 1973, with a form developed through the extrapolation of both the story’s psychoanalytical plotline and a bouncing pinball’s trajectory within a boxy confinement.

Perihan MacDonald: Inspired by decades of fruitless efforts by planners and architects to redevelop the site of the infamous Lake Street K-Mart in Minneapolis, this project added to the existing structure while re-establishing street access on Nicollet Avenue, which had been bisected by construction of the big box store in 1977. The new development provides an architectural anchor to the neighborhood, while serving as multi-use space with a restaurant, a bike shop to serve the nearby greenway, and stores to supply goods from local vendors.

Yikai Qiao: Plan Project, 2019

This plan project serves both for meditation and sound. The musical rehearsal rooms and the meditation niches coexist in the building, each possessing distinctive spatial features. I got the inspiration from Yayoi Kusama’s paintings. By duplicating, transforming and inverting the dots and curves, I tried to create new patterns for the plan. Some curves were transformed into the walls of the chambers for music rehearsal, while some tiny circles became niches within the poche of thick walls. With the exploration of the various ways of the extrusion, I then applied certain spatial qualities on the plan pattern. The niches will have interactions with the individuals within it – providing space for lying or leaning on. The music rooms serve for rehearsal or performance based on their various room sizes. Meditation and melody would come to a new harmony of adjacency in this project.

Jack Rusk: This project takes the plan of a previous project and collages it to generate sectional relationships. This intentional misreading of plan organization produced both a massing strategy—stacked and slipping volumes—and the organizational idea of a continuous condition flowing around discrete interrupting volumes. The program was a spiritual space to accommodate migrants seeking sanctuary. Embedded in an arroyo in the Sonoran desert, the structure can provide respite from the scorching desert sun while collecting water during the desert’s abundant, albeit fleeting, monsoon season. This water is stored and filtered in cisterns below, making it available year-round. This infrastructural capacity defines the overall flow of the building, from which discrete spaces are reclaimed for domesticity, care, and spirituality.

Abby Sandler: Based on an analysis of David Moreno’s “Untitled (2001)” the project was conceived as a non-denominational spiritual center and daycare. The plan emerged as a field of circles equal in size connected at 4 tangent points. An irregular grid breaks up this field condition connecting arcs to radii to diameters to tangents, creating a variety of interior spatial conditions. The procession through the spiritual center starts at street level and gradually descends 12 feet below ground, while the daycare remains above ground. As the adults make their spiritual descent to the main chapel or smaller gathering spaces, key sight lines are established across a central pathway through the site, allowing the children to observe this descent. In effect, the conventional roles of observer and observed have been reversed, presenting the children with a new degree in agency and authority over the site.

Janelle Schmidt: The “Image-Object” project brief called for us to make an object out of the implied depth found in an image of our choosing. Pictured is a partial study model and a hyper-rationalization of my perception of the original image: bones stretching through skin.

Jun Shi

Timothy Wong: As our contemporary condition is shifting towards an image-centric one, this project contemplates the site of the image content as the context for architectural design. Through engaging the image with a disciplinary lens, specifically Le Corbusier’s 5 points of architecture as exemplified in Villa Savoye, the image estranges the traditional formal relationships. Hence, taking Keith Haring’s ‘Pop Shop Tokyo’ as the project’s context, its composition of characters and squiggles was explored to suggest an organizational logic of a part to loose-whole relationship. In which the figures inform each other’s form while not directly touching each other. Therefore, speculating a collapse of the rigid separation of parts.

Jessica Zhou: How do we exert control over the uncontrollable? How can the uncontrollable become an organic part of the planning process?

I experimented on finding a way to work with autonomous conditions by producing a seemingly arbitrary order of patterns and experimenting with its self-regulating capacities. The architect is able to determine spatial rules and structural principles in this field of indeterminacy.

The constructed field condition gives a hierarchy of accessibility as well as flexibility among different parts of the meditation center + public markets complex. On the contrary to how the public market in the East originates itself around a central gathering space, the meditation center consists of a hierarchy of courtyard-centered units. Each unit is exclusive to the outside in a way that they only have direct access to the courtyard; different units from different courtyards share no visual and physical contact. This is to ensure a sense of collective among smaller groups and a sense of privacy from the exterior.

Hannah Mayer Baydoun: New Miniature for the Framed Experience of “Behind the Scenes” Food Production. Based on Kamal ud-Din Bezhad’s “The Seduction of Yusef”.

Adare Brown: Convent in San Joaquin Valley

Meghna Mudaliar: “Blending?”

Takuomi Samejima: The Sound Trapper

Rachael Tsai

Anjiang Xu: No Sides

Alex Mingda Zhang: The Stair Times