Allan's Undergraduate Architecture Portfolio

EDUCATION

University of California, Los Angeles / CA / 3.93 GPA / B.A. Arch

Shoreline Community College / WA / 3.98 GPA / A.A.

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

Project Manager / Solar Decathlon

SKILLS

Software Adobe (PS, AI, ID), Rhino 3D, Vray, AutoCAD, Enscape, Microsoft Office, Grasshopper

Languages Mandarin, English, Taiwanese Programming C++

ACTIVITIES & EXPERIENCES

Architectural Designer / CGM Development / CA Volunteer / Taipei Economic & Cultural Office / CA Private / ROC Mandatory Military Service / Taiwan

Math & Physics Tutor / SCC Learning Support Center / WA Marketing Officer / Taiwanese Youth Alliance in UW / WA

08.2020 - 07.2022 08.2017 - 07.2019 08.2021 - 03.2022 10.2023 - Present 02.2022 - 07.2022 07.2019 - 12.2019 08.2018 - 07.2019 08.2017 - 08.2018

Contents

01

[MODU]NATURE

Environment, Techonology, Solar Decathlon Zero-Energy Residence | Team Compitition 02 BUILDING

WITHIN A BUILDING

Pandemic, Living, Architectural Elements Townhouse Retrofit | ARCH 122 - Studio II 03

BUNDLE TOWER

Sculpture, Programming, Defamiliarization Artist Collective living | ARCH 123 - Studio III 04

FRANKENSTEIN

Cmoic, Futurism, Hyperbuilding An Entrepreneur’s Dream Building | ARCH 121- Studio I 05

REWRITE THE BUILDING

Operation, Landscape, Phenomenology Calligraphy Art Center | ARCH 141- Tech I 06

AUGMENTED ICEBERG Form, Context, Topology Object Study| ARCH 143 - Tech III 07

HEART OF TAIPEI - A VISION OF TRANSFORMING

Memorial, History, Transitional Justice Memorial Park| Compition 08

CREATIVE WORKS

[MODU]NATURE

Zero-Energy Attached Housing

ModuNature is a three-story attached house that combines new modular building techniques with traditional passive design strategies. We aim to create a human-centered design model for future urban infill. The modular construction features a multiarchitectural layout with a diversity of unit types, including studio units on the second floor which have shared kitchen and laundry facilities to lower the unit cost and encourage interaction. As a piece of a small urban village, this project improves density, the enjoyment of outdoor space, and a sense of community.

UCLA Team Compitition Design Partner: Plant Prefab Site: Los Angeles, California

Project Data

Location: LA, CA

Climate Zone: 3B Lot Size: 15,380 sqft Occupancy: 36 of people Construction Cost: $300/sqft Energy Performance (EUI): 3 kBtu/sqft*yr Average Utility Cost: $1,680/month

Community

The design responses to the current environmental and social issues in Los Angeles. Through prefab construction and emphasis on diverse unit types along with large shared spaces, we are motivated to connect with neighbors and create opportunities for social interaction and community life. The street walk-up, side garden, screened front patios and exposed rear patois are all designed to support a human scale revitalization of the urban area.

Reproducible Prototype

The design uses a steel frame structure filled with prefabricated wood units which are transported from factory to site and craned into space. Units all share a vertical service core acting which also acts as a lightwell and outdoor garden space, providing a seasonally changing landscape and passive energy reducing strategies: sunlight, ventilation, thermal heat storage, and air purification. Service facilities and auxiliary spaces are highly integrated and are shared to save energy to obtain a more comfortable living environment and flexible and free space functions.

Engineering

The structural system uses a steel moment frame structure to support the modular units and decks while providing earthquake and wind resilience. Integrated engineering systems such as hydraloop, onsite PV and natural ventilation reduce energy and water consumption. Selected smart technologies and efficient appliances are implemented throughout the units to reduce consumption costs to meet our goal of a net-zero energy building.

Embodied Environmental Impact

The use of modular systems reduces on-site pollution and waste, due to the construction method that concentrates 80% of assembly to an offsite location. Sustainable materials are used wherever possible, such as hemp and/ or cellulose insulation to reduce the building’s carbon footprint.

Comfort and Environmental Quality

The integrated, shared, and green service core is surrounded by modular residential units, improving occupants’ comfort and well-being. It effectively reduces the use of materials and simultaneously acts as an adjustable controller for light and ventilation.

Occupant Experience

Appropriate volume dislocation allows natural elements to enter, ensuring proper lighting and a healthy environment. A co-sharing communal patio enables an established sense of community outside private residential units.

Gardens, vertical vines, and living wall screens offer residents a sanctuary from the busy city life and bring nature into their everyday personal spaces

02 BUILDING WITHIN A BUILDING

Townhouse Retrofit

In 2021, our houses become spaceships, zipping from place to place in an instant. The communication that people crave is confined to a single screen. The private space is spread out in the grid of the world of super flat. Today, the filter is off and our culture is back. There seems to be something interesting about the chaos that has arisen. I was commissioned by a cartoonist to transform his jumbled townhouse and separate the studio from the living space. He wanted a building with a sense of weight, and hoped to rebuild lost relationships through art.

ARCH 122 - Studio II

Instructor: Katy Barkan

Formal Concept: Both Thick and Thin

The corners are extended using the thick walls and are connected by the thin wrapper. “Oblique intersection,” as the principle of redefining the townhouse and the addition, makes the boundaries of public and private, interior and exterior in a state of ambiguity.

Life Style: Segregated but Interlocked

With the additional ramps and stairs, living and working areas are segregated to form a loop of life. The loop then twists to meet the need of different specials qualities. Work and life maintain a certain distance. It just like the relationship between people, close yet distant.

WORKING/LIVING

Requirement

[1] 1800 sf of living space and 2400 sf of work space.

[2] The building must accommodate a family of four and approximately four employees.

[3] Libraries and studios must be at least 12’ high.

Circulation: Follow or Penetrate

The circulation then follows or penetrates the wrapper to guide people constantly experiencing the transition of inside and outside. People constantly feel the presence of others. Repeated turning corners eliminate the need for doors. One therefore has to probe to determine what is out of view, and it is hard to know who will suddenly appear.

Unrolled Elevation

The thin wrapper passes through the thick walls and creates continuous openings that are hidden by the thin wrapper at the junction of the volumes. When the thin wrapper and thick wall meet, suggested by the external appearance, interaction and communication opportunities for different areas are created although people cannot physically encounter each other.

Spatial Experience

The sequential scenes connect different themes in series. Complex spatial experience and interpersonal communication are also spread out.

BUNDLE TOWER

Artists’ collective Living

In the existing contemporary landscape of visually oriented fields of study, casual compositions and other formless expressions have begun to re-emerge, particularly in the disciplines of art, architecture, and popular image culture. One permeated with project proposals that use physics simulations in order to generate a form in a state of duress, or aggregate a collection of volumes and objects into casual, nonhierarchical compositions.

ARCH 123 - Studio III

Instructor: Max Kuo Teammates: Mari Kitayama, Olivia Duff Site: Atwater Park, LA

Breaking the Boxes

Based on the need for the single function residential district, we designed monumental housing towers for artists in order to activate this area. By analyzing the needs of artist groups, we understand the distinctive living style of them and decide which elements should be valued and expressed in design.

Program Diagram

Unrolled Section

The figuration of the composite embodies tumbling rolling movement which conceives as a loop, adopting the aggregation of material or volume to achieve the hierarchically programmatic significance of the building.

Elevation

For the form generation, we used cylinders inspired by our precedent, the Berlin Philharmonic, and bundled them together with the trail house to prevent them from falling over.

Circulation Analysis

The Change of Plans

There are two kinds of residence which are regular and experimental units. Although from the outside the bridges look like public passages instinctively, we actually programmed it as a radical collective living space. Artists can access it by the cores of the towers or from the secret entrance in the art gallery. Once people enter this space, they will follow the cursive elements on the plan to unfold his life. On the other hand, we also have normal units for those who need privacy.

Architecture as Sculpture

Walking along the oval pedestrian walkway in the park, visitors could freely access the communal space from the lobby, cafeteria, art studio, and library. The open conversation among programs encourages people to make arts in an inclusive learning environment.

A new prototype for artists this combined living space, studio and gallery allows for a style of living that is art in its own sense.

FRANKENSTEIN

An Entrepreneur’s Dream Building

Inspired by the theoretical drawings of paper architects, a cartoonist rendered his vision of the future entrepreneur’s life through narrative. His attitude towards architecture is extreme, believing that a perfect life needs to be achieved through precise external control.

ARCH 121- Studio I

Instructor: Jimenez Lai

Teammates: Luyan Li, Emma Liu, Wingyi Hui

This design contradicts preconceived ideas of stability by embracing the idea of “to string together.” Geometric forms of contrasting sizes which are seemingly floating are strung together by three primary structurally important columns. Negative spaces between the massing manifest a wonderful journey, inviting those who enter the structure to stay.

Boss’s Capsule

Hanging Garden

Exhibition Sphere

Sky Gym

Working Sphere

Library Canteen Entrance

Library

The jurisdiction is located at the lower level. The open space design blurs the boundary between the interior and exterior. The space also prepares for the mood transitions of one’s architectural journey.

Working Sphere

Two of the four primary columns featured in this design pierce through the floors and negative space of this jurisdiction. This jurisdiction features a hollowed out spherical form and two outdoor platforms. Featuring a working area, pool and spaces to sit and relax, this seemingly enclosed sector of the design is completely exposed to the outdoors.

Exhibition Sphere

This jurisdiction serves as an exhibition area, lecture hall, gallery, and public recreational zone. With continuous spiral ramps stemming from the bottom to the top, which provides various possibilities in interconnected experience. People could access the space from each intersection of two spheres.

Hanging Garden

The hanging garden serves as an events space and a playground. The shape of the garden is like a wave and then creates a short façade and high rear. An undulating path that curves around the garden connects to the higest office.

REWRITE THE BUILDING 05

Calligraphy Art Center

This project is about the expansion and transformation of a significant learning environment for a brave new world.

ARCH 141- Tech I

Instructor: Mohamed Sharif

From Johannes Duiker’s Open Air School

We were assigned one school to document, analysis, and transform.

Transformation

Most of the architectural elements of the precedent were removed. The basic circulation and form were transformated into a distinct state by a series of operation according to it’s accommodating target.

To Calligraphy Art Center

The design explores the continuity and penetration of circulations. The form derived form strokes of Chinese calligraphy make people lose their sense of inside and outside.

City Landscape

There are also terraces and stairs around the exterior of the building, creating multiple dramatic public spaces while integrating the surrounding landscape. The streamlined and organic form blurs the obvious boundary of the public space of the precedent.

Loop Back and Forth

Many different elements eventually form continuous paths. Vistors are unable to directly see through the complex circulations. Only by personal experience can people feel the surprise of entering different areas, and the excitement of reaching the highest point after endless circling.

AUGMENTED ICEBERG

Object Study

Icebergs are not buildings. Icebergs have no reference. In their otherness, icebergs offer critical distance to examine disciplinary convention. Translating these glacial forms raises fundamental issues of how to communicate qualities of architectural objects - how to abstract, how to extrapolate.

ARCH 143 - Tech III

Teammate: Ana Simpson

Instructor: Regina

Teng

This study investigates the different types of representations of a single object. Icebergs are not buildings. They are material organizations with their own scales, contexts, logic, and behaviors.

Through a series of 2D and 3D translations, starting with a photograph of an iceberg, all the information is layered in the way from the form to the abstraction, which eventually reached the state of rematerialization.

Translation between multiple techniques is required to approximate the full complexity of the object. The inherent bias in each medium is necessary to best emphasize the characteristics of glacial forms.

07 CREATIVE WORKS

The subject matter is a figure of Taoism in Taiwan. The head general in the world of dead drives out evil spirits when the main god is on a holy patrol. Although the facial features are destroyed by the makeup, it still reveals solemnity and sacredness. Monochromatic gradation highlightw the mystery and forms the illusionary of the underworld.

AUSPICIOUS

Cardboard

250 x 35 x 101 cm

The Chinese dragon chasing the dragon ball symbolizes the desire and longing for a better future.

I tried to design a set of planes and used tenons instead of glue to assemble the cardboard. Transforming 2D planes into a 3D sculpture and letting them stand in balance tested my perception of weight and space organization.

HEAD GENERAL IN THE WORLD OF DEAD Charcoal, pencil, white chalk, 47 x 61 cm

TENDING THE ROOTS OF WISDOM

Ink on rice paper

90 x 180 cm

Chinese calligraphy emphasizes the writing skills of each stroke and character. The glyph structures reveal the elegance and introverted harmony between changes of black and white. Each character, however, still maintains its own connotation, expressing different qualities such as thick, blunt, slender, delicate, light or spirited respectively. This work won the first prize in the Taiwan Student Art Competition of Changhua.

WHIRLPOOL

Plaster

21 x 21 x 8 cm

The use of materials and form expression are the main Intention of this work. I did not design at first, but to feel the compatibility or conflict of plaster while sculpting.

SPACELAB

Musical instruments (brass, nickel silver, iron) 70 x 60 x 55 cm

This sculpture exists in space. It was evolved from the wastes that escaped from the human world. They met, combined and duplicated without purpose, and finally became a growing life that evolves on its own. Was it a kind of free will or just the result fully determined by a sequence of cause and effect going back to the big bang? This work inspires the journey of infinite imagination.

STILL LIFE

Acrylic on canvas 40.5 x 50.5 cm

I learned to tint the whole canvas with a very diluted colorwash first that help me contrast lighter and darker values. I sketched my layout with charcoal and then filled the rough shape with the monochromatic pigments and added the details. Finally, I applied colors, dark shadows and highlight with glazing liquid to show the transparency of glass.